Capital Volume 1
by Karl Marx


Chapter 25

The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

Section 1. -- The Increased demand For Labour-Power that
Accompanies Accumulation, The Composition of Capital Remaining
the Same



    In this chapter we consider the influence of the growth of
capital on the lot of the labouring class. The most important
factor in this inquiry, is the composition of capital and the
changes it undergoes in the course of the process of
accumulation.
    The composition of capital is to be understood in a two-fold
sense. On the side of value, it is determined by the proportion
in which it is divided into constant capital or value of the
means of production, and variable capital or value of
labour-power, the sum total of wages. On the side of material, as
it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided
into means of production and living labour-power. This latter
composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the
means of production employed, on the one hand, and the mass of
labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the
former the value-composition, the latter the technical
composition of capital. Between the two there is a strict
correlation. To express this, I call the value-composition of
capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical
composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic
composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of
capital, without further qualification, its organic composition
is always understood.
    The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch
of production have, one with another, more or less different
compositions. The average of their individual compositions gives
us the composition of the total capital in this branch of
production. Lastly, the average of these averages, in all
branches of production, gives us the composition of the total
social capital of a country, and with this alone are we, in the
last resort, concerned in the following investigation.
    Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent
or of the part invested in labour-power. A part of the
surplus-value turned into additional capital must always be
re-transformed into variable capital, or additional labour-fund.
If we suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same,
the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e., that a
definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same
mass of labour-power to set it in motion), then the demand for
labour and the subsistence-fund of the labourers clearly increase
in the same proportion as the capital, and the more rapidly, the
more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital produces
yearly a surplus-value, of which one part is yearly added to the
original capital; since this increment itself grows yearly along
with the augmentation of the capital already functioning; since
lastly, under special stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening
of new markets, or of new spheres for the outlay of capital in
consequence of newly developed social wants, etc., the scale of
accumulation may be suddenly extended, merely by a change in the
division of the surplus-value or surplus-product into capital and
revenue, the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the
increase of labour-power or of the number of labourers; the
demand for labourers may exceed the supply, and, therefore, wages
may rise. This must, indeed, ultimately be the case if the
conditions supposed above continue. For since in each year more
labourers are employed than in its predecessor, sooner or later a
point must be reached, at which the requirements of accumulation
begin to surpass the customary supply of labour, and, therefore,
a rise of wages takes place. A lamentation on this score was
heard in England during the whole of the fifteenth, and the first
half of the eighteenth centuries. The more or less favourable
circumstances in which the wage-working class supports and
multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of
capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly
reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e., the relation of
capitalists on the one hand, and wage-workers on the other, so
reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation,
reproduces the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more
capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage-workers
at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour-power, which must
incessantly re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital's
self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose
enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of
individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction
of labour-power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction
of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore,
increase of the proletariat.(1*)
    Classical economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam
Smith, Ricardo, etc., as mentioned earlier, inaccurately
identified accumulation with the consumption, by the productive
labourers, of all the capitalised part of the surplus-product, or
with its transformation into additional wage-labourers. As early
as 1696 John Bellers says: "For if one had a hundred thousand
acres of land and as many pounds in money, and as many cattle,
without a labourer, what would the rich man be, but a labourer'?
And as the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers there
will be, the more rich men... the labour of the poor being the
mines of the rich."(2*) So also Bernard de Mandeville at the
beginning of the eighteenth century. "It would be easier, where
property is well secured, to live without money than without
poor; for who would do the work?... A they [the poor] ought to be
kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving.
lf here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry,
and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was
brought up in nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably
the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every
private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich
nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never
be idle, and yet continually spend what they get... Those that
get their living by their daily labour... have nothing to stir
them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to
relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that can render
the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money,
for as too little will, according as his temper is, either
dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him
insolent and lazy... From what has been said, it is manifest,
that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the
surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; for
besides, that they are the never-failing nursery of fleets and
armies, without them there could be no enjoyment, and no product
of any country could be valuable."To make the society" [which of
course consists of non-workers] "happy and people easier under
the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of
them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges
and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes
for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied."(3*) What
Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man, had not yet seen, is
that the mechanism of the process of accumulation itself
increases, along with the capital, the mass of "labouring poor,"
i.e., the wage labourers, who turn their labour-power into an
increasing power of self-expansion of the growing capital, and
even by doing so must eternise their dependent relation on their
own product, as personified in the capitalists. In reference to
this relation of dependence, Sir F.M. Eden in his "The State of
the Poor, an History of the Labouring Classes in England," says,
"the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate
to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but
in consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the
society must be indefatigably employed... There are others who,
though they 'neither toil nor spin,' can yet command the produce
of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to
civilisation and order... They are peculiarly the creatures of
civil institutions,(4*) which have recognised that individuals
may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion
of labour.... Persons of independent fortune... owe their
superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of
their own, but almost entirely... to the industry of others. It
is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of
labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of
the community... This [scheme approved by Eden] would give the
people of property sufficient (but by no means too much)
influence and authority over those who... work for them; and it
would place such labourers, not in an abject or servile
condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as
all who know human nature, and its history, will allow to be
necessary for their own comfort."(5*) Sir F.M. Eden, it may be
remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam Smith during
the eighteenth century that produced any work of importance.(6*)
    Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which
conditions are those most favourable to the labourers, their
relation of dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable,
or, as Eden says: "easy and liberal." Instead of becoming more
intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence
only becomes more extensive, i.e., the sphere of capital's
exploitation and rule merely extends with its own dimensions and
the number of its subjects. A larger part of their own
surplus-product, always increasing and continually transformed
into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means
of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their
enjoyments; can make some additions to their consumption-fund of
clothes, furniture, etc., and can lay by small reserve-funds of
money. But just as little as better clothing, food, and
treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation
of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the
wage-worker. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of
accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and
weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for
himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. In the
controversies on this subject the chief fact has generally been
overlooked, viz., the differentia specifica of capitalistic
production. Labour-power is sold today, not with a view of
satisfying, by its service or by its product, the personal needs
of the buyer. His aim is augmentation of his capital, production
of commodities containing more labour than he pays for,
containing therefore a portion of value that costs him nothing,
and that is nevertheless realised when the commodities are sold.
Production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of
production. Labour-power is only saleable so far as it preserves
the means of production in their capacity of capital, reproduces
its own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a source of
additional capital.(7*) The conditions of its sale, whether more
or less favourable to the labourer, include therefore the
necessity of its constant re-selling, and the constantly extended
reproduction of all wealth in the shape of capital. Wages, as we
have seen, by their very nature, always imply the performance of
a certain quantity of unpaid labour on the part of the labourer.
Altogether, irrespective of the case of a rise of wages with a
falling price of labour, etc, such an increase only means at best
a quantitative diminution of the unpaid labour that the worker
has to supply. This diminution can never reach the point at which
it would threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts
as to the rate of wages (and Adam Smith has already shown that in
such a conflict, taken on the whole, the master is always
master), a rise in the price of labour resulting from
accumulation of capital implies the following alternative:
    Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise
does not interfere with the progress of accumulation. In this
there is nothing wonderful, for, says Adam Smith, "after these
(profits) are diminished, stock may not only continue to
increase, but to increase much faster than before... A great
stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than
a small stock with great profits." (l.c., ii, p. 189) In this
case it is evident that a diminution in the unpaid labour in no
way interferes with the extension of the domain of capital. Or,
on the other hand, accumulation slackens in consequence of the
rise in the price of labour, because the stimulus of gain is
blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens; but with its
lessening, the primary cause of that lessening vanishes, i.e.,
the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour-power.
The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the
very obstacles that it temporarily creates. The price of labour
falls again to a level corresponding with the needs of the
self-expansion of capital, whether the level be below, the same
as, or above the one which was normal before the rise of wages
took place. We see thus: In the first case, it is not the
diminished rate either of the absolute, or of the proportional,
increase in labour-power, or labouring population, which causes
capital to be in excess, but conversely the excess of capital
that makes exploitable labour-power insufficient. In the second
case, it is not the increased rate either of the absolute, or of
the proportional, increase in labour-power, or labouring
population, that makes capital insufficient; but, conversely, the
relative diminution of capital that causes the exploitable
labour-power, or rather its price, to be in excess. It is these
absolute movements of the accumulation of capital which are
reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable
labour-power, and therefore seem produced by the latter's own
independent movement. To put it mathematically: the rate of
accumulation is the independent, not the dependent, variable; the
rate of wages, the dependent, not the independent, variable.
Thus, when the industrial cycle is in the phase of crisis, a
general fall in the price of commodities is expressed as a rise
in the value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a general
rise in the price of commodities, as a fall in the value of
money. The so-called currency school concludes from this that
with high prices too little, with low prices too much money is in
circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of
facts(8*) are worthily paralleled by the economists, who
interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that
there are now too few, now too many wage-labourers.
    The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of
the pretended "natural law of population," reduces itself simply
to this: The correlation between accumulation of capital and rate
of wages is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid
labour transformed into capital, and the additional paid labour
necessary for the setting in motion of this additional capital.
It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes,
independent one of the other: on the one hand, the magnitude of
the capital; on the other, the number of the labouring
population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between
the unpaid and the paid labour of the same labouring population.
If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working-class,
and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly
that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary
addition of paid labour, then wages rise, and, all other
circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in
proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at
which the surplus-labour that nourishes capital is no longer
supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part
of revenue is capitalised, accumulation lags, and the movement of
rise in wages receives a check. The rise of wages therefore is
confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations
of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a
progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation,
metamorphosed by economists into a pretended law of Nature, in
reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation
excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of
labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could
seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an
ever-enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation. It cannot be
otherwise in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to
satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead
of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the
needs of development on the part of the labourer. As, in
religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in
capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his
own hand.(9*)

Section 2 -- Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital
Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the
Concentration That Accompanies It

    According to the economists themselves, it is neither the
actual extent of social wealth, nor the magnitude of the capital
already functioning, that lead to a rise of wages, but only the
constant growth of accumulation and the degree of rapidity of
that growth. (Adam Smith, Book I, chapter 8) So far, we have only
considered one special phase of this process, that in which the
increase of capital occurs along with a constant technical
composition of capital. But the process goes beyond this phase.
    Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system,
then, in the course of accumulation, a point is reached at which
the development of the productivity of social labour becomes the
most powerful lever of accumulation. "The same cause," says Adam
Smith, "which raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock,
tends to increase its productive powers, and to make a smaller
quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work."
    Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil,
etc., and from the skill of independent and isolated producers
(shown rather qualitatively in the goodness than quantitatively
in the mass of their products), the degree of productivity of
labour, in a given society, is expressed in the relative extent
of the means of production that one labourer, during a given
time, with the same tension of labour-power, turns into products.
The mass of the means of production which he thus transforms,
increases with the productiveness of his labour. But those means
of production play a double part. The increase of some is a
consequence, that of the others a condition of the increasing
productivity of labour. E.g., with the division of labour in
manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw material is
worked up in the same time, and, therefore, a greater mass of raw
material and auxiliary substances enter into the labour-process.
That is the consequence of the increasing productivity of labour.
On the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts of burden,
mineral manures, drain-pipes, etc., is a condition of the
increasing productivity of labour. So also is it with the means
of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of
transport, etc. But whether condition or consequence, the growing
extent of the means of production, as compared with the
labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the
growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter
appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in
proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in
the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour-process as
compared with the objective factor.
    This change in the technical composition of capital, this
growth in the mass of means of production, as compared with the
mass of the labour-power that vivifies them, is reflected again
in its value-composition, by the increase of the constant
constituent of capital at the expense of its variable
constituent. There may be, e.g., originally 50 per cent of a
capital laid out in means of production, and 50 per cent. in
labour-power; later on, with the development of the productivity
of labour, 80 per cent in means of production, 20 per cent in
labour-power, and so on. This law of the progressive increase in
constant capital, in proportion to the variable, is confirmed at
every step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the
prices of commodities, whether we compare different economic
epochs or different nations in the same epoch. The relative
magnitude of the element of price, which represents the value of
the means of production only, or the constant part of capital
consumed, is in direct, the relative magnitude of the other
element of price that pays labour (the variable part of capital)
is in inverse proportion to the advance of accumulation.
    This diminution in the variable part of capital as compared
with the constant, or the altered value-composition of the
capital, however, only shows approximately the change in the
composition of its material constituents. If, e.g., the
capital-value employed today in spinning is 7/8 constant and 1/8
variable, whilst at the beginning of the 18th century it was 1/2
constant and 1/2 variable, on the other hand, the mass of raw
material, instruments of labour, etc., that a certain quantity of
spinning labour consumes productively today, is many hundred
times greater than at the beginning of the 18th century. The
reason is simply that, with the increasing productivity of
labour, not only does the mass of the means of production
consumed by it increase, but their value compared with their mass
diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely, but not in
proportion to their mass. The increase of the difference between
constant and variable capital, is, therefore, much less than that
of the difference between the mass of the means of production
into which the constant, and the mass of the labour-power into
which the variable, capital is converted. The former difference
increases with the latter, but in a smaller degree.
    But, if the progress of accumulation lessens the relative
magnitude of the variable part of capital, it by no means, in
doing this, excludes the possibility of a rise in its absolute
magnitude. Suppose that a capital-value at first is divided into
50 per cent of constant and 50 per cent of variable capital;
later into 80 per cent of constant and 20 per cent of variable.
If in the meantime the original capital, say £6,000, has
increased to £18,000, its variable constituent has also
increased. It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But whereas formerly
an increase of capital by 20 per cent would have sufficed to
raise the demand for labour 20 per cent, now this latter rise
requires a tripling of the original capital.
    In Part IV it was shown, how the development of the
productiveness of social labour pre-supposes co-operation on a
large scale; how it is only upon this supposition that division
and combination of labour can be organised, and the means of
production economised by concentration on a vast scale; how
instruments of labour which, from their very nature, are only fit
for use in common, such as a system of machinery, can be called
into being; how huge natural forces can be pressed into the
service of production; and how the transformation can be effected
of the process of production into a technological application of
science. On the basis of the production of commodities, where the
means of production are the property of private persons, and
where the artisan therefore either produces commodities, isolated
from and independent of others, or sells his labour-power as a
commodity, because he lacks the means for independent industry,
co-operation on a large scale can realise itself only in the
increase of individual capitals, only in proportion as the means
of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed
into the private property of capitalists. The basis of the
production of commodities can admit of production on a large
scale in the capitalistic form alone. A certain accumulation of
capital, in the hands of individual producers of commodities,
forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the specifically
capitalistic mode of production. We had, therefore, to assume
that this occurs during the transition from handicraft to
capitalistic industry. It may be called primitive accumulation,
because it is the historic basis, instead of the historic result
of specifically capitalist production. How it itself originates,
we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough that it forms the
starting-point. But all methods for raising the social productive
power of labour that are developed on this basis, are at the same
time methods for the increased production of surplus-value or
surplus-product, which in its turn is the formative element of
accumulation. They are, therefore, at the same time methods of
the production of capital by capital, or methods of its
accelerated accumulation. The continual re-transformation of
surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape of the
increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the process
of production. This in turn is the basis of an extended scale of
production, of the methods for raising the productive power of
labour that accompany it, and of accelerated production of
surplus-value. If, therefore, a certain degree of accumulation of
capital appears as a condition of the specifically capitalist
mode of production, the latter causes conversely an accelerated
accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital,
therefore, the specifically capitalistic mode of production
develops, and with the capitalist mode of production the
accumulation of capital. Both these economic factors bring about,
in the compound ratio of the impulses they reciprocally give one
another, that change in the technical composition of capital by
which the variable constituent becomes always smaller and smaller
as compared with the constant.
    Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration
of means of production, with a corresponding command over a
larger or smaller labour-army. Every accumulation becomes the
means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth
which functions as capital, accumulation increases the
concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual
capitalists, and thereby widens the basis of production on a
large scale and of the specific methods of capitalist production.
The growth of social capital is effected by the growth of many
individual capitals. All other circumstances remaining the same,
individual capitals, and with them the concentration of the means
of production, increase in such proportion as they form aliquot
parts of the total social capital. At the same time portions of
the original capitals disengage themselves and function as new
independent capitals. Besides other causes, the division of
property, within capitalist families, plays a great part in this.
With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of
capitalists grows to a greater or less extent. Two points
characterise this kind of concentration which grows directly out
of, or rather is identical with, accumulation. First: The
increasing concentration of the social means of production in the
hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining equal,
limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The
part of social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of
production is divided among many capitalists who face one another
as independent commodity producers competing with each other.
Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it are,
therefore, not only scattered over many points, but the increase
of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new
and the sub-division of old capitals. Accumulation, therefore,
presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of
the means of production, and of the command over labour; on the
other, as repulsion of many individual capitals one from another.
    This splitting-up of the total social capital into many
individual capitals or the repulsion of its fractions one from
another, is counteracted by their attraction. This last does not
mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of
the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It
is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their
individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by
capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.
This process differs from the former in this, that it only
pre-supposes a change in the distribution of capital already to
hand, and functioning; its field of action is therefore not
limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute
limits of accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass
in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by
many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from
accumulation and concentration.
    The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the
attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A
brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition
is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of
commodities depends, caetetis paribus, on the productiveness of
labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the
larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered
that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production,
there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital
necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The
smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production
which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got
hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the
number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the
antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small
capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their
conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist
production an altogether new force comes into play -- the credit
system, which* in its first stages furtively creeps in as the
humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of
individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the
money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society,
in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and
terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally
transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the
centralisation of capitals.
    Commensurately with the development of capitalist production
and accumulation there develop the two most powerful levers of
centralisation -- competition and credit. At the same time the
progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to
centralisation, i.e., the individual capitals, whilst the
expansion of capitalist production creates, on the one hand, the
social want, and, on the other, the technical means necessary for
those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous
centralisation of capital for their accomplishment. Today,
therefore, the force of attraction, drawing together individual
capitals, and the tendency to centralisation are stronger than
ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the
movement towards centralisation is determined, in a certain
degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and superiority of
economic mechanism already attained, progress in centralisation
does not in any way depend upon a positive growth in the
magnitude of social capital. And this is the specific difference
between centralisation and concentration, the latter being only
another name for reproduction on an extended scale.
Centralisation may result from a mere change in the distribution
of capitals already existing, from a simple alteration in the
quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital.
Here capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand
because there it has been withdrawn from many individual hands.
In any given branch of industry centralisation would reach its
extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were
fused into a single capital.(10*) In a given society the limit
would be reached only when the entire social capital was united
in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist
company.
    Centralisation completes the work of accumulation by enabling
industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations.
Whether this latter result is the consequence of accumulation or
centralisation, whether centralisation is accomplished by the
violent method of annexation -- when certain capitals become such
preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter
the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate
fragments to themselves -- or whether the fusion of a number of
capitals already formed or in process of formation takes place by
the smoother process of organising joint-stock companies -- the
economic effect remains the same. Everywhere the increased scale
of industrial establishments is the starting-point for a more
comprehensive organisation of the collective work of many, for a
wider development of their material motive forces in other words,
for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of
production, carried on by customary methods, into processes of
production socially combined and scientifically arranged.
    But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by
reproduction as it passes from the circular to the spiral form,
is clearly a very slow procedure compared with centralisation,
which has only to change the quantitative groupings of the
constituent parts of social capital. The world would still be
without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got
a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the
construction of a railway. Centralisation, on the contrary,
accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye, by means of
joint-stock companies. And whilst centralisation thus intensifies
and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously
extends and speeds those revolutions in the technical composition
of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its
variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for
labour.
    The masses of capital fused together overnight by
centralisation reproduce and multiply as the others do, only more
rapidly, thereby becoming new and powerful levers in social
accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the progress of social
accumulation we tacitly include -- today -- the effects of
centralisation.
    The additional capitals formed in the normal course of
accumulation (see Chapter XXIV, Section 1) serve particularly as
vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries,
and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old
capital also reaches the moment of renewal from top to toe, when
it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others in a perfected
technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour will
suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw
materials.
    The absolute reduction in the demand for labour which
necessarily follows from this is obviously so much the greater,
the higher the degree in which the capitals undergoing this
process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the
centralisation movement.
    On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in
the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in
proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital
periodically reproduced with change of composition, repels more
and more of the labourers formerly employed by it.

Section 3 -- Progressive Production of a Relative
Surplus-Population or Industrial Reserve Army

    The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as
its quantitative extension only, is effected, as we have seen,
under a progressive qualitative change in its composition, under
a constant increase of its constant, at the expense of its
variable constituent.(11*)
    The specifically capitalist mode of production, the
development of the productive power of labour corresponding to
it, and the change thence resulting in the organic composition of
capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of
accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop
at a much quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute
increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the
centralisation of the individual capitals of which that total is
made up; and because the change in the technological composition
of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change
in the technological composition of the original capital. With
the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of
constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say
1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc.,
so that as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total
value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, etc., is transformed into
labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8,
into means of production. Since the demand for labour is
determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its
variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with
the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously
assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the
magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as
this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital,
its variable constituent or the labour incorporated in it, also
does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The
intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as
simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is
not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital,
accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to
absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of
the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those
already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation
and centralisation becomes a source of new changes in the
composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its
variable, as compared with its constant constituent. This
accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that
goes along with the accelerated increase of the total capital,
and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse
form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of
the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly
than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But
in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly
produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and
extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a
population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs
of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a
surplus-population.
    Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement
of its accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it
more or less as a whole, now distributes its various phases
simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some
spheres a change in the composition of capital occurs without
increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple
centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is
connected with absolute diminution of its variable constituent,
or of the labour-power absorbed by it; in others again, capital
continues growing for a time on its given technical basis, and
attracts additional labour-power in proportion to its increase,
while at other times it undergoes organic change, and lessens its
variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of the
variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of
labourers employed by it, is always connected with violent
fluctuations and transitory production of surplus-population,
whether this takes the more striking form of the repulsion of
labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less real
form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring
population through the usual channels.(12*) With the magnitude of
social capital already functioning, and the degree of its
increase, with the extension of the scale of production, and the
mass of the labourers set in motion, with the development of the
productiveness of their labour, with the greater breadth and
fulness of all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of
the scale on which greater attraction of labourers by capital is
accompanied by their greater repulsion; the rapidity of the
change in the organic composition of capital, and in its
technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of
production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously,
now alternately. The labouring population therefore produces,
along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means
by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a
relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always
increasing extent.(13*) This is a law of population peculiar to
the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special
historic mode of production has its own special laws of
population, historically valid within its limits alone. An
abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only,
and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.
    But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product
of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist
basis, this surplus-population becomes, conversely, the lever of
capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the
capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial
reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if
the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the
limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the
changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human
material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and
the development of the productiveness of labour that accompanies
it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also; it
grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already
functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of
society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not
merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once
places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of
production in the form of additional capital; it grows, also,
because the technical conditions of the process of production
themselves -- machinery, means of transport, etc. -- now admit of
the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into
additional means of production. The mass of social wealth,
overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable
into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old
branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into
newly formed branches, such as railways, etc., the need for which
grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases,
there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men
suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of
production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these
masses. The course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a
decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods
of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and
stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or
less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve
army or surplus-population. In their turn, the varying phases of
the industrial cycle recruit the surplus-population, and become
one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction. This
peculiar course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier
period of human history, was also impossible in the childhood of
capitalist production. The composition of capital changed but
very slowly. With its accumulation, therefore, there kept pace,
on the whole, a corresponding growth in the demand for labour.
Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of
more modern times, it found a check in the natural limits of the
exploitable labouring population, limits which could only be got
rid of by forcible means to be mentioned later. The expansion by
fits and starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to
its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the
former, but the former is impossible without disposable human
material, without an increase in the number of labourers
independently of the absolute growth of the population. This
increase is effected by the simple process that constantly "sets
free" a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number
of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production.
The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends,
therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the
labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands. The
superficiality of Political Economy shows itself in the fact that
it looks upon the expansion and contraction of credit, which is a
mere symptom of the periodic changes of the industrial cycle, as
their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a certain
definite motion, always repeat this, so is it with social
production as soon as it is once thrown into this movement of
alternate expansion and contraction. Effects, in their turn,
become causes, and the varying accidents of the whole process,
which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of
periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even
Political Economy then sees that the production of a relative
surplus-population -- i.e., surplus with regard to the average
needs of the self-expansion of capital -- is a necessary
condition of modern industry.
    "Suppose," says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political
Economy at Oxford, subsequently employed in the English Colonial
Office, "suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises,
the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by
emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms,
what would be the consequence? That, at the first returning
demand for labour, there would be a deficiency. However rapid
reproduction may be, it takes, at all events, the space of a
generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the profits
of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of
the prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating
themselves for the interval during which it is slack. This power
is secured to them only by the command of machinery and of manual
labour. They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to
increase the activity of their operations when required, and to
slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they
cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of
competition on which the wealth of the country is founded."(14*)
Even Malthus recognises over-population as a necessity of modern
industry, though, after his narrow fashion, he explains it by the
absolute over-growth of the labouring population, not by their
becoming relatively supernumerary. He says: "Prudential habits
with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among
the labouring class of a country mainly depending upon
manufactures and commerce, might injure it.... From the nature of
a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into
market in consequence of a particular demand till after the lapse
of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by
saving, may take place much more rapidly. a country is always
liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the
maintenance of labour faster than the increase of
population."(15*) After Political Economy has thus demonstrated
the constant production of a relative surplus-population of
labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic accumulation, she
very aptly, in the guise of an old maid, puts in the mouth of her
"beau ideal" of a capitalist the following words addressed to
those supernumeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation
of additional capital: -- "We manufacturers do what we can for
you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must
subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers
to the means of subsistence."(16*)
    Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the
quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of
population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial
reserve army independent of these natural limits.
    Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or
diminution of the variable capital corresponds rigidly with the
increase or diminution of the number of labourers employed.
    The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the
same, or even fall, while the variable capital increases. This is
the case if the individual labourer yields more labour, and
therefore his wages increase, and this although the price of
labour remains the same or even falls, only more slowly than the
mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case,
becomes an index of more labour, but not of more labourers
employed. It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to
press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a
greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same. In
the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in
proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former
that increase is much smaller. The more extended the scale of
production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with
the accumulation of capital.
    We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of
production and of the productive power of labour -- at once the
cause and effect of accumulation-enables the capitalist, with the
same outlay of variable capital, to set in action more labour by
greater exploitation (extensive or intensive) of each individual
labour-power. We have further seen that the capitalist buys with
the same capital a greater mass of labour-power, as he
progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature
labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that
of young persons or children.
    On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of
accumulation, a larger variable capital sets more labour in
action without enlisting more labourers; on the other, a variable
capital of the same magnitude sets in action more labour with the
same mass of labour-power; and finally, a greater number of
inferior labour-powers by displacement of higher.
    The production of a relative surplus-population, or the
setting free of labourers, goes on therefore yet more rapidly
than the technical revolution of the process of production that
accompanies, and is accelerated by, the advance of accumulation;
and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the
variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the
means of production, as they increase in extent and effective
power, become to a less extent means of employment of labourers,
this state of things is again modified by the fact that in
proportion as the productiveness of labour increases, capital
increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for
labourers. The overwork of the employed part of the working-class
swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater
pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former,
forces these to submit to over-work and to subjugation under the
dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the
working-class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other
part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the
individual capitalists,(17*) and accelerates at the same time the
production of the industrial reserve army on a scale
corresponding with the advance of social accumulation. How
important is this element in the formation of the relative
surplus-population, is shown by the example of England. Her
technical means for saving labour are colossal. Nevertheless, if
tomorrow morning labour generally were reduced to a rational
amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the
working-class according to age and sex, the working population to
hand would be absolutely insufficient for the carrying on of
national production on its present scale. The great majority of
the labourers now "unproductive" would have to be turned into
"productive" ones.
    Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are
exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the
industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the
periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are, therefore,
not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the
working population, but by the varying proportions in which the
working-class is divided into active and reserve army, by the
increase or diminution in the relative amount of the
surplus-population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed,
now set free. For Modern Industry with its decennial cycles and
periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation advances, are
complicated by irregular oscillations following each other more
and more quickly, that would indeed be a beautiful law which
pretends to make the action of capital dependent on the absolute
variation of the population, instead of regulating the demand and
supply of labour by the alternate expansion and contraction of
capital, the labour-market now appearing relatively under-full,
because capital is expanding, now again over-full, because it is
contracting. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According
to them, wages rise in consequence of accumulation of capital.
The higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid
multiplication, and this goes on until the labour-market becomes
too full, and therefore capital, relatively to the supply of
labour, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the
reverse of the medal. The working population is little by little
decimated as the result of the fall in wages, so that capital is
again in excess relatively to them, or, as others explain it,
falling wages and the corresponding increase in the exploitation
of the labourer again accelerates accumulation, whilst, at the
same time, the lower wages hold the increase of the working-class
in check. Then comes again the time, when the supply of labour is
less than the demand, wages rise, and so on. A beautiful mode of
motion this for developed capitalist production! Before, in
consequence of the rise of wages, any positive increase of the
population really fit for work could occur, the time would have
been passed again and again, during which the industrial campaign
must have been carried through, the battle fought and won.
    Between 1849 and 1859, a rise of wages practically
insignificant, though accompanied by falling prices of corn, took
place in the English agricultural districts. In Wiltshire, e.g.,
the weekly wages rose from 7s to 8s; in Dorsetshire from 7s or
8s, to 9s, etc. This was the result of an unusual exodus of the
agricultural surplus-population caused by the demands of war, the
vast extension of railroads, factories, mines, etc. The lower the
wages, the higher is the proportion in which ever so
insignificant a rise of them expresses itself. If the weekly
wage, e.g., is 20s and it rises to 22s, that is a rise of 10 per
cent.; but if it is only 7s and it rises 4 to 9s, that is a rise
of 28 4/7 per cent, which sounds very fine. Everywhere the
farmers were howling, and the London Economist, with reference to
these starvation-wages, prattled quite seriously of "a general
and substantial advance."(18*) What did the farmers do now? Did
they wait until, in consequence of this brilliant remuneration,
the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied that
their wages must fall again, as prescribed by the dogmatic
economic brain? They introduced more machinery, and in a moment
the labourers were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory
even to the farmers. There was now "more capital" laid out in
agriculture than before, and in a more productive form. With this
the demand for labour fell, not only relatively, but absolutely.
    The above economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate
the general movement of wages, or the ratio between the
working-class -- i.e., the total labour-power -- and the total
social capital, with the Laws that distribute the working
population over the different spheres of production. If, e.g., in
consequence of favourable circumstances, accumulation in a
particular sphere of production becomes especially active, and
profits in it, being greater than the average profits, attract
additional capital, of course the demand for labour rises and
wages also rise. The higher wages draw a larger part of the
working population into the more favoured sphere, until it is
glutted with labour-power, and wages at length fall again to
their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great.
Then, not only does the immigration of labourers into the branch
of industry in question cease; it gives place to their
emigration. Here the political economist thinks he sees the why
and wherefore of an absolute increase of workers accompanying an
increase of wages, and of a diminution of wages accompanying an
absolute increase of labourers. But he sees really only the local
oscillation of the labour-market in a particular sphere of
production -- he sees only the phenomena accompanying the
distribution of the working population into the different spheres
of outlay of capital, according to its varying needs.
    The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation
and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army;
during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its
pretensions in check. Relative surplus-population is therefore
the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour
works. It confines the field of action of this law within the
limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and
to the domination of capital.
    This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of
economic apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the
introduction of new, or the extension of old, machinery, a
portion of variable capital is transformed into constant, the
economic apologist interprets this operation which "fixes"
capital and by that very act sets labourers "free," in exactly
the opposite way, pretending that it sets free capital for the
labourers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of
these apologists. What are set free are not only the labourers
immediately turned out by the machines, but also their future
substitutes in the rising generation, and the additional
contingent, that with the usual extension of trade on the old
basis would be regularly absorbed. They are now all "set free,"
and every new bit of capital looking out for employment can
dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect
on the general labour demand will be nil, if this capital is just
sufficient to take out of the market as many labourers as the
machines threw upon it. If it employs a smaller number, that of
the supernumeraries increases; if it employs a greater, the
general demand for labour only increases to the extent of the
excess of the employed over those "set free." The impulse that
additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have given
to the general demand for labour, is therefore in every case
neutralised to the extent of the labourers thrown out of
employment by the machine. That is to say, the mechanism of
capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute
increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in
the general demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a
compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death
of the displaced labourers during the transition period that
banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The demand for
labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor supply of
labour with increase of the working-class. It is not a case of
two independent forces working on one another. Les des sont
pipes. Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its
accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour,
it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the "setting
free" of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the
unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more
labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain
extent, independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the
law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the
despotism of capital. As soon, therefore, as the labourers learn
the secret, how it comes to pass that in the same measure as they
work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as the
productive power of their labour increases, so in the same
measure even their function as a means of the self-expansion of
capital becomes more and more precarious for them; as soon as
they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition
among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative
surplus-population; as soon as, by Trades' Unions, etc., they try
to organise a regular co-operation between employed and
unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects
of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class, so
soon capital and its sycophant, Political Economy, cry out at the
infringement of the "eternal" and so to say "sacred" law of
supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed
disturbs the "harmonious" action of this law. But, on the other
hand, as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse circumstances
prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with it,
the absolute dependence of the working-class upon the capitalist
class, capital, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels
against the "sacred" law of supply and demand, and tries to check
its inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.

Section 4 -- Different Forms of The Relative Surplus-Population,
The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation

    The relative surplus-population exists in every possible
form. Every labourer belongs to it during the time when he is
only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Not taking into
account the great periodically recurring forms that the changing
phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an acute form
during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times --
it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the
stagnant.
    In the centres of modern industry -- factories, manufactures,
ironworks, mines, etc. -- the labourers are sometimes repelled,
sometimes attracted again in greater masses, the number of those
employed increasing on the whole, although in a constantly
decreasing proportion to the scale of production. Here the
surplus-population exists in the floating form.
    In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops,
where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern
division of labour is carried out, large numbers of boys are
employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once
reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in
the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly
discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating
surplus-population, growing with the extension of those branches
of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital
that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population
grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. That the natural
increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the
requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time
is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement
of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful labourers,
a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is not more glaring
than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of
hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work,
because the division of labour chains them to a particular branch
of industry.(19*)
    The consumption of labour-power by capital is, besides, so
rapid that the labourer, half-way through his life, has already
more or less completely lived himself out. He falls into the
ranks of the supernumeraries, or is thrust down from a higher to
a lower step in the scale. It is precisely among the work people
of modern industry that we meet with the shortest duration of
life. Dr Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated
"that the average age at death of the Manchester... upper middle
class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the
labouring class was 17; while at Liverpool those figures were
represented as 35 against 15. It thus appeared that the
well-to-do classes had a lease of life which was more than double
the value of that which fell to the lot of the less favoured
citizens."(20*) In order to conform to these circumstances, the
absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take
place under conditions that shall swell their numbers, although
the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence, rapid renewal
of the generations of labourers (this law does not hold for the
other classes of the population). This social need is met by
early marriages, a necessary consequence of the conditions in
which the labourers of modern industry live, and by the premium
that the exploitation of children sets on their production.
    As soon as capitalist production takes possession of
agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to which it does so,
the demand for an agricultural labouring population falls
absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in
agriculture advances, without this repulsion being, as in
non-agricultural industries, compensated by a greater attraction.
Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on
the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing
proletariat, and on the look-out for circumstances favourable to
this transformation. (Manufacture is used here in the sense of
all non-agricultural industries.)(21*) This source of relative
surplus-population is thus constantly flowing. But the constant
flow towards the towns presupposes, in the country itself, a
constant latent surplus-population, the extent of which becomes
evident only when its channels of outlet open to exceptional
width. The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the
minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the
swamp of pauperism.
    The third category of the relative surplus-population, the
stagnant, forms a part of the active labour army, but with
extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an
inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its
conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the
working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special
branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by
maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages. We have learnt to
know its chief form under the rubric of "domestic industry." It
recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of
modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those
decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to
manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with
the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a
surplus-population advances. But it forms at the same time a
self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the
working-class, taking a proportionally greater part in the
general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact,
not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size
of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of
wages, and therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of
which the different categories of labourers dispose. This law of
capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even
civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction
of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.(22*)
    The lowest sediment of the relative surplus-population
finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of
vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the "dangerous"
classes, this layer of society consists of three categories.
First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at
the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of
paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every
revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are
candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of
great prosperity, as 1860, e.g., speedily and in large numbers
enrolled in the active army of labourers. Third, the demoralised
and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb
to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of
labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer;
the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase
of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the
mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital
of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial
reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative
surplus-population, its necessity in theirs; along with the
surplus-population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist
production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It
enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital
knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own
shoulders on to those of the working-class and the lower middle
class.
    The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the
extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the
absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its
labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same
causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also
the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the
industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential
energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion
to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a
consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio
to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the
lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve
army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute
general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is
modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of
which does not concern us here.
    The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches
to the labourers the accommodation of their number to the
requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production
and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first
word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative
surplus-population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is
the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of
labour, and the dead weight of pauperism.
    The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of
production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social
labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing
expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society --
where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but
the means of production employ the labourer undergoes a complete
inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of
labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means
of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their
condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour-power
for the increasing of another's wealth, or for the self-expansion
of capital. The fact that the means of production, and the
productiveness of labour, increase more rapidly than the
productive population, expresses itself, therefore,
capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring
population always increases more rapidly than the conditions
under which capital can employ this increase for its own
self-expansion.
    We saw in Part IV, when analysing the production of relative
surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for
raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at
the cost of the individual labourer. all means for the
development of production transform themselves into means of
domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they
mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to
the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of
charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange
from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in
the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an
independent power; they distort the conditions under which he
works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the
more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into
working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of
the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of
surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and
every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the
development of those methods. It follows therefore that in
proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be
his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally that
always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or
industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of
accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly
than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It
establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with
accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is,
therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of
toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the
opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its
own product in the form of capital.
    This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation(23*)
is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although
by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent
analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging
to pre-capitalistic modes of production.
    The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of
the 18th century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production
as a general natural law of social wealth. "In the economy of a
nation, advantages and evils always balance one another (it bene
ed il male economico in una nazione sempre all, istessa misura):
the abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal to the
want of it with others (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale
alla mancanza di essi in altri): the great riches of a small
number are always accompanied by the absolute privation of the
first necessaries of life for many others. The wealth of a nation
corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with
its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The
poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and
active," etc.(24*) In a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years
after Ortes, the Church of England parson, Townsend, glorified
misery as a necessary condition of wealth. "Legal constraint (to
labour) is attended with too much trouble, violence, and
noise,... whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent,
unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry
and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions."
Everything therefore depends upon making hunger permanent among
the working class, and for this, according to Townsend, the
principle of population, especially active among the poor,
provides. "It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be
to a certain degree improvident" [i.e., so improvident as to be
born without a silver spoon in the mouth], "that there may always
be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most
ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is
thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only
relieved from drudgery... but are left at liberty without
interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their
various dispositions... it [the Poor Law] tends to destroy the
harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which
God and Nature have established in the world."(25*) If the
Venetian monk found in the fatal destiny that makes misery
eternal, the raison d'être of Christian charity, celibacy,
monasteries and holy houses, the Protestant prebendary finds in
it a pretext for condemning the laws in virtue of which the poor
possessed a right to a miserable public relief.
    "The progress of social wealth," says Storch, "begets this
useful class of society... which performs the most wearisome, the
vilest, the most disgusting functions, which takes, in a word, on
its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and
procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and
conventional [c'est bon!] dignity of character."(26*) Storch asks
himself in what then really consist the progress of this
capitalistic civilisation with its misery and its degradation of
the masses, as compared with barbarism. He finds but one answer:
security!
    "Thanks to the advance of industry and science," says
Sismondi, "every labourer can produce every day much more than
his consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst his labour
produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume
it himself, make him less fit for labour." According to him,
"men" [i.e., non-workers] "would probably prefer to do without
all artistic perfection, and all the enjoyments that
manufacturers procure for us, if it were necessary that all
should buy them by constant toil like that of the labourer....
Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the
same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because
the one works that the other rests.... The indefinite
multiplication of the productive powers of labour can then only
have for result the increase of luxury and enjoyment of the idle
rich."(27*)
    Finally Destutt de Tracy, the fish-blooded bourgeois
doctrinaire, blurts out brutally.. "In poor nations the people
are comfortable. in rich nations they are generally poor."(28*)

Section 5 -- Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation

(a) England from 1846-1806

    No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of
capitalist accumulation as the period of the last 20 years. It is
as if this period had found Fortunatus' purse. But of all
countries England again furnishes the classical example, because
it holds the foremost place in the world-market, because
capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and
lastly, because the introduction of the Free-trade millennium
since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar economy. The
titanic advance of production -- the latter half of the 20 years'
period again far surpassing the former -- has been already
pointed out sufficiently in Part IV.
    Although the absolute increase of the English population in
the last half century was very great, the relative increase or
rate of growth fell constantly, as the following table borrowed
from the census shows.
    Annual increase per cent of the population of England and
Wales in decimal numbers:

    1811-1821  1.533 per cent
    1821-1831  1.446 per cent
    1831-1841  1.326 per cent
    1841-1851  1.216 per cent
    1851-1861  1.141 per cent

    Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of
wealth. Here the movement of profit, rent of land, etc., that
come under the income tax, furnishes the surest basis. The
increase of profits liable to income tax (farmers and some other
categories not included) in Great Britain from 1853 to 1864
amounted to 50.47% or 4.58% as the annual average,(29*) that of
the population during the same period to about 12%. The
augmentation of the rent of land subject to taxation (including
houses, railways, mines, fisheries, etc.), amounted for 1853 to
1864 to 38% or 3 5/12% annually. Under this head the following
categories show the greatest increase:

Houses, 38.8%       3.50%
Quarries, 84.7%     7.70%
Mines, 68.85%       6.26%
Iron-works, 39.92%  3.63%
Fisheries, 57.37%   5.21%
Gasworks, 126.02%  11.45%
Railways, 83.29&    7.57%(30*)

    If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of
four consecutive years each, the rate of augmentation of the
income increases constantly. It is, e.g., for that arising from
profits between 1853 to 1857 1.73% yearly; 1857-1861, 2.74%, and
for 1861-64, 9.30% yearly. The sum of the incomes of the United
Kingdom that come under the income tax was in 1856, £307,068,898;
in 1859, £328,127,416; in 1862, £351,745,241; in 1863,
£359,142,897; in 1864, £362,462,279; in 1865, £385,530,020.(31*)
    The accumulation of capital was attended at the same time by
its concentration and centralisation. Although no official
statistics of agriculture existed for England (they did for
Ireland), they were voluntarily given in 10 counties. These
statistics gave the result that from 1851 to 1861 the number of
farms of less than 100 acres had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so
that 5,016 had been thrown together into larger farms.(32*) From
1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than £1,000,000 came
under the succession, duty: from 1825 to 1855, however, 8 did;
and 4 from 1856 to June, 1859, i.e., in 4 1/2 years.(33*) The
centralisation will, however, be best seen from a short analysis
of the income Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, etc.),
in the years 1864 and 1865. I note beforehand that incomes from
this source pay income tax on everything over £60. These incomes
liable to taxation in England, Wales and Scotland, amounted in
1864 to £95,844,222, in 1865 to £105,435,579.(34*) The number of
persons taxed were in 1864, 308,416, out of a population of
23,891,009; in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of 24,127,003.
The following table shows the distribution of these incomes in
the two years:


Year Ending April 5th, 1864

Income from Profits         Persons
Total Income of these

£95,844,222                 308,416
 57,028,289                  23,334
 36,415,225                   3,619
 22,809,781                     832
  8,744,762                      91

Year Ending April 5th, 1865

£105,435,738                332,431
  64,554,297                 24,265
  42,535,576                  4,021
  27,555,313                    107


    In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,453,079
tons of coal, of value £16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of
value £23,197,968; in 1855, 3,218,154 tons of pig-iron, of value
£8,045,385. 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value £11,919,877. In 1854
the length of the railroads worked in the United Kingdom was
8,054 miles, with a paid-up capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the
length was 12,789 miles, with capital paid up of £425, 719,613.
In 1854 the total sum of the exports and imports of the United
Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865, £489,923,285.
    The following table shows the movement of the exports:

1846        £58,843,377
1849         63,596,052
1856        115,826,048
1860        135,842,817
1865        165,862,402
1866        188,917,563(35*)

    After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph
of the Registrar-General of the British people: "Rapidly as the
population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress
of industry and wealth."(36*)
    Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the
producers of this wealth, to the working-class. "It is one of the
most melancholy features in the social state of this country",
says Gladstone, "that while there was a decrease in the consuming
powers of the people, and while there was an increase in the
privations and distress of the labouring class and operatives,
there was at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in
the upper classes, and a constant increase of capital."(37*) Thus
spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of February
13th, 1843. On April 16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in
which he introduced his Budget: "From 1842 to 1852 the taxable
income of the country increased by 6 per cent.... In the 8 years
from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853
by 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost
incredible.... this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power... entirely confined to classes of property.... must be of
indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens
commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been
growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any
rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume
to say"(38*) How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has
remained "poor," only "less poor" in proportion as it produces
for the wealthy class "an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power," then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the
extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased,
because the extremes of wealth have. As to the cheapening of the
means of subsistence, the official statistics, e.g., the accounts
of the London Orphan Asylum, show an increase in price of 20% for
the average of the three years 1860-1862, compared with
1851-1853. In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a
progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt,
coals, and a number of other necessary means of subsistence.(39*)
Gladstone's next Budget speech of April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric
dithyrambus on the advance of surplus-value-making and the
happiness of the people "tempered by poverty." He speaks of
masses "on the border" of pauperism, of branches of trade in
which "wages have not increased," and finally sums up the
happiness of the working class in the words: "human life is but,
in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence."(40*)
Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official
considerations, declares roundly: "I do not, of course, deny that
money wages have been augmented by this increase of capital (in
the last ten years), but this apparent advantage is to a great
extent lost, became many of the necessaries of life are becoming
dearer" (he believes became of the fall in value of the precious
metals). "the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is no
perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial
classes,.. They (the Labourers) become almost the slaves of the
tradesman, to whom they owe money."(41*)
    In the chapters on the "working-day" and "machinery" the
reader has seen under what circumstances the British
working-class created an "intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power" for the propertied classes. There we were chiefly
concerned with the social functioning of the labourer. But for a
full elucidation of the law of accumulation, his condition
outside the workshop must also be looked at, his condition as to
food and dwelling. The limits of this book compel us to concern
ourselves chiefly with the worst paid part of the industrial
proletariat, and with the agricultural labourers, who together
form the majority of the working-class.
    But first, one word on official pauperism, or on that part of
the working-class which has forfeited its condition of existence
(the sale of labour-power), and vegetates upon public alms. The
official list of paupers numbered in England(42*) 851,369
persons; in 1856, 877,767; in 1865, 971,433. In consequence of
the cotton famine, it grew in the years 1863 and 1864 to
1,079,382 and 1,014,978. The crisis of 1866, which fell most
heavily on London, created in this centre of the world-market,
more populous than the kingdom of Scotland, an increase of
pauperism for the year 1866 of 19.5% compared with 1865, and of
24.4% compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the
first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. From the analysis of
the statistics of pauperism, two points are to be taken. On the
one hand, the fluctuation up and down of the number of paupers,
reflects the periodic changes of the industriaL cycle, On the
other, the official statistics become more and more misleading as
to the actual extent of pauperism in proportion as, with the
accumulation of capital, the class-struggle, and, therefore, the
class-consciousness of the working-men, develop. E.g the
barbarity in the treatment of the paupers, at which the English
Press (The Times, Pall Mall Gazette, etc.) have cried out so
loudly during the last two years, is of ancient date. F. Engels
showed in 1844 exactly the same horrors, exactly the same
transient canting outcries of "sensational literature." But
frightful increase of "deaths by starvation" in London during the
last ten years proves beyond doubt the growing horror in which
the working-people hold the slavery of the workhouse, that place
of punishment for misery.(43*)

(b) The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class

    During the cotton famine of 1862, Dr Smith was charged by the
Privy Council with an inquiry into the conditions of nourishment
of the distressed operatives in Lancashire and Cheshire. His
observations during many preceding years had led him to the
conclusion that "to avert starvation diseases," the daily food of
an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon
with 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at
least 4,300 grains of carbon with 200 grains of nitrogen; for
women, about the same quantity of nutritive elements as are
contained in 2 lbs of good wheaten bread, for men 1/9 more; for
the weekly average of adult men and women, at least 28,600 grains
of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His calculation was
practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its agreement
with the miserable quantity of nourishment to which want had
forced Down the consumption of the cotton operatives. This was,
in December, 1862, 29,211 grains of carbon, and 1,295 grains of
nitrogen weekly.
    In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into
the state of distress of the worst-nourished part of the English
working-class. Dr Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council,
chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr Smith. His inquiry
ranges on the one hand over the agricultural labourers, on the
other, over silk-weavers, needle-women, kid-glovers,
stocking-weavers, glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter
categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers,
exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to
select in each category the most healthy families, and those
comparatively in the best circumstances.
    As a general result it was found that "in only one of the
examined classes of in-door operatives did the average nitrogen
supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the
estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e., sufficient to avert
starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was defect --
in one, a very large defect -- of both nitrogen and carbon.
Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural
population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less
than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more
than one-third were with.less than the estimated sufficiency of
nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire,
Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous
food was the average local diet."(44*) Among the agricultural
labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United
Kingdom, were the worst fed.(45*) The insufficiency of food among
the agricultural labourers, fell, as a rule, chiefly on the women
and children, for "the man must eat to do his work." Still
greater penury ravaged the town-workers examined. "They are so
ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of
severe and injurious privation."(46*) ("Privation" of the
capitalist all this! i.e., "abstinence" from paying for the means
of subsistence absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of
his "hands.") The following table shows the conditions of
nourishment of the above-named categories of purely town-dwelling
workpeople, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr Smith, and
with the food-allowance of the cotton operatives during the time
of their greatest distress:

Both Sexes      Average Weekly Carbon       Average Weekly
Nitrogen
Five in-door
 occupations        28,876 grains               1,192 grains
Unemployed
 Lancashire
 Operatives         28,211 grains               1,295 grains
Minimum quantity
 to be allowed
 to the Lancashire
 Operatives equal
 number of males and
 females            28,600 grains               1,330 grains(47*)

    One half, or 60/125 of the industrial labour categories
investigated, had absolutely no beer, 28% no milk. The weekly
average of the liquid means of nourishment in the families varied
from seven ounces in the needle-women to 24 3/4 ounces in the
stocking makers. The majority of those who did not obtain milk
were needle-women in London. The quantity of bread-stuffs
consumed weekly varied from 7 3/4 lbs for the needle-women to 11
1/2 lbs for the shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9 lbs
per adult weekly. Sugar (treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces
weekly for the kid-glovers to 11 ounces for the stocking-makers;
and the total average per week for all categories was 8 ounces
per adult weekly. Total weekly average of butter (fat, etc.) 5
ounces per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied
from 7 1/4 ounces for the silk weavers, to 18 1/4 ounces for the
kid-glovers; total average for the different categories 13.6
ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult, gave the following
average figures; silk-weavers 2s 2 1/2d, needle-women 2s 7d,
kid-glovers 2s 9d, shoemakers 2s 7 3/4d, stocking-weavers 2s 6
1/4d. For the silk-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only
1s 8 1/2d. The worst categories were the needle- women,
silk-weavers and kid-glovers.(48*) Of these facts, Dr Simon in
his General Health Report says: "That cases are innumerable in
which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator of disease,
can be affirmed by any one who is conversant with poor law
medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of
hospitals..., Yet in this point of view, there is, in my opinion,
a very important sanitary context to be added. It must be
remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and
that as a rule great poorness of diet will only come when other
privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet is
a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would
think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which
intervene between life and starvation, the household will have
been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel
will have been even scantier than food-against inclemencies of
weather there will have been no adequate protection -- dwelling
space will have been stinted to the degree in which over-crowding
produces or increases disease; of household utensils and
furniture there will have been scarcely any-even cleanliness will
have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be
self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every such endeavour
will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be
where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly
there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage,
least scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or
worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such
are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly
exposed, when it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food.
And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude against life,
the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious
moment... These are painful reflections, especially when it is
remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the
deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the poverty of
working populations. Indeed, as regards the indoor operatives,
the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the
most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a
qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting...
And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a
circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism."(49*)
    The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the
most industrious layers of the working-class, and the extravagant
consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist
accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic
laws are known. It is otherwise with the "housing of the poor."
Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the
centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the
corresponding heaping together of the labourers, within a given
space; that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the
more miserable are the dwellings of the working-people.
"Improvements" of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth, by
the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces
for banks, warehouses, etc., the widening of streets for business
traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of
tramways, etc., drive away the poor into even worse and more
crowded hiding places. On the other hand, every one knows that
the Dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to their
excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house
speculators with more profit or less cost than ever were the
mines of Potosi. The antagonistic character of capitalist
accumulation, and therefore of the capitalistic relations of
property generally,(50*) is here so evident, that even the
official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox
onslaughts on "property and its rights." With the development of
industry, with the accumulation of capital, with the growth and
"improvement" of towns, the evil makes such progress that the
mere fear of contagious diseases which do not spare even
"respectability," brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no
less than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the
frightened bourgeois in some towns. as Liverpool, Glasgow, etc.,
took strenuous measures through their municipalities.
Nevertheless Dr Simon, in his report of 1865, says: "Speaking
generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in
England." By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was
made into the conditions of the housing of the agricultural
labourers, in 1865 of the poorer classes in the towns. The
results of the admirable work of Dr Julian Hunter are to be found
in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on "Public
Health." To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later. On
the condition of town dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a
general remark of Dr Simon. "Although my official point of view,"
he says, "is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires
that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored... In
its higher degrees it [i.e., overcrowding] almost necessarily
involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of
bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual
nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to
these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and
deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who
are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into
infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons
thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that
atmosphere of civilisation which has its essence in physical and
moral cleanliness."(51*)
    London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations,
absolutely unfit for human beings. "He feels clear," says Dr
Hunter, "on two points; first, that there are about 20 large
colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable
condition exceeds almost anything he has seen elsewhere in
England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house
accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated
condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse than was
the case 20 years ago."(52*) "It is not too much to say that life
in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal."(53*)
    Further, the better-off part of the working-class, together
with the small shopkeepers and other elements of the lower middle
class, falls in London more and more under the curse of these
vile conditions of dwelling, in proportion as "improvements", and
with them the demolition of old streets and houses, advance, as
factories and the afflux of human beings grow in the metropolis,
and finally as house rents rise with the ground-rents "Rents have
become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more than one
room."(54*) There is almost no house-property in London that is
not overburdened with a number of middlemen. For the price of
land in London is always very high in comparison with its yearly
revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of
it again at a jury price (the expropriation valuation fixed by
jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value
arising from the neighbourhood of some large establishment. As a
consequence of this there is a regular trade in the purchase of
"fag-ends of leases." "Gentlemen in this business may be fairly
expected to do as they do-get all they can from the tenants while
they have them, and leave as little as they can for their
successors."(55*)
    The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In
consequence of the making of railroads in the City, "the
spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London of a number
of families wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty
worldly good on their backs, without any resting place but the
workhouse."(56*) The workhouses are already over-crowded, and the
"improvements" already sanctioned by Parliament are only just
begun. If labourers are driven away by the demolition of their
old houses, they do not leave their old parish, or at most they
settle down on its borders, as near as they can get to it. "They
try, of course, to remain as near as possible to their workshops.
The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish,
parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding
even those... Even at an advanced rent, the people who are
displaced will. hardly be able to get an accommodation so good as
the meagre one they have left... Half the workmen... of the
Strand... walked two miles to their work."(57*) This same Strand,
a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the
wealth of London, may serve as an example of the packing together
of human beings in that town. In one of its parishes the Officer
of Health reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half he width
of the Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood that
every sanitary measure, which, as has been the case hitherto in
London, hunts the labourers from one quarter, by emolishing
uninhabitable houses, serves only to crowd them together yet more
closely in another. "Either," says Dr Hunter, "the whole
proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public
compassion(!) be effectually aroused to the obligation which may
now be without exaggeration called national, of supplying cover
to those who by reason of their having no capital, cannot provide
it for themselves, though they can by periodical payments reward
those who will provide it for them."(58*) Admire this
capitalistic justice! The owner of land, of houses, the
businessman, when expropriated by "improvements" such as
railroads, the building of new streets, etc., not only receives
full indemnity. He must, according to law, human and divine, be
comforted for his enforced "abstinence" over and above this by a
thumping profit. The labourer, with his wife and child and
chattels is thrown out into the street, and -- if he crowds in
too large numbers towards quarters of the town where the vestries
insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of sanitation!
    Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century
no single town in England of 100,000 inhabitants. Only five bad
more than 50,000. Now there are 28 towns with more than 50,000
inhabitants. "The result of this change is not only that the
class of town people is enormously increased, but the old
closepacked little towns are now centres, built round on every
side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable to the
rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The
successors of these rich are occupying the larger houses at the
rate of a family to each room [... and find accommodation for two
or three lodgers..] and a population, for which the houses were
not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose
surroundings are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the
children."(59*) The more rapidly capital accumulates in an
industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows the stream
of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the
improvised dwellings of the labourers.
    Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district
of growing productiveness, takes the next place after London in
the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons live there in
single rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community,
houses in great numbers have lately been destroyed by the
authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new
houses progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town
was, therefore, in 1865, more full than ever. Scarcely a room was
to let. Dr Embleton, of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says:
"There can be little doubt that the great cause of the
continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding
of human beings, and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The
rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in
confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light,
air, and cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and
insalubrity, and a disgrace to any civilised community. In them
men, women, and children lie at night huddled together; and as
regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and the
day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time
together, the beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house
badly supplied with water and worse with privies; dirty,
unventilated, and pestiferous."(60*) The price per week of such
lodgings ranges from 8d to 3s. "The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,"
says Dr Hunter, "contains a sample of the finest tribe of our
countrymen, often sunk by external circumstances of house and
street into an almost savage degradation."(61*)
    As result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour,
the state of the dwellings of an industrial town may today be
bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or the edileship of the town may have
pulled itself together for the removal of the most shocking
abuses. Tomorrow, like a swarm of locusts, come crowding in
masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural
labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the
hitherto respectable labourer's dwelling is transformed into a
lodging-house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets
in the 30 years' war. Example Bradford (Yorkshire). There the
municipal philistine was just busied with urban improvements.
Besides, there were still in Bradford, in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited
houses. But now comes that revival of trade which the mildly
liberal Mr. Forster, the negro's friend, recently crowed over
with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an
overflow from the waves of the ever fluctuating "reserve army" or
"relative surplus-population." The frightful cellar habitations
and rooms registered in the list,(62*) which Dr Hunter obtained
from the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most part
inhabited by well-paid labourers. They declared that they would
willingly pay for better dwellings if they were to be had.
Meanwhile, they become degraded, they fall ill, one and all,
whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M.P., sheds tears over the
blessings of Free-trade, and the profits of the eminent men of
Bradford who deal in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865,
Dr Bell, one of the poor law doctors of Bradford, ascribes the
frightful mortality of fever-patients in his district to the
nature of their dwellings. "In one small cellar measuring 1,500
cubic feet... there are ten persons... Vincent Street, Green Aire
Place, and the Leys include 223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants,
435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds -- and in that term I
include any roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings have
an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5 and 6 persons to
each, and some people, I am told, are absolutely without beds;
they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards young
men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need
scarcely add that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty,
stinking holes, utterly unfit for human habitations; they are the
centres from which disease and death are distributed amongst
those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to
fester in our midst."(63*)
    Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of
its dwellings. "Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic
misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe."(64*)

(c) The Nomad Population

    We turn now to a class of people whose origin is
agricultural, but whose occupation is in great part industrial.
They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according
to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they are not
on the march, they "camp." Nomad labour is used for various
operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning,
railway-making, etc. A flying column of pestilence, it carries
into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp,
small-pox, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, etc.(65*) In
undertakings that involve much capital outlay, such as railways,
etc., the contractor himself generally provides his army with
wooden huts and the like, thus improvising villages without any
sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local boards,
very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the labourers in
two-fold fashion-as soldiers of industry and as tenants.
According as the wooden hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its
inhabitant, navvy, or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4
shillings weekly.(66*) One example will suffice. In September,
1864, Dr Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal
Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following
denunciation to Sir George Grey, Home Secretary: -- "Small-pox
cases were rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve
months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway
from Lewisham to Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition
to the principal works being in the immediate neighbourhood of
this town, here was also established the depôt for the whole of
the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity
employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for
them all, huts were built in several places along the line of the
works by the contractor, Mr Jay, for their especial occupation.
These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and, besides,
were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to
accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might
be, although there were only two rooms to each tenement. The
consequences were, according to the medical report we received,
that in the night-time these poor people were compelled to endure
all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells
arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close
under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the
Nuisances Removal Committee by a medical gentleman who had
occasion to visit these huts, and he spoke of their condition as
dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed his fears
that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some
sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay
promised to appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ,
who were suffering from contagious diseases, might at once be
removed. He repeated that promise on the 23rd July last, but
although since the date of the last promise there have been
several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the
same disease, yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his
promise. On the 9th September instant, Mr. Kelson, surgeon,
reported to me further cases of small-pox in the same huts, and
he described their condition as most disgraceful. I should add,
for your (the Home Secretary's) information that an isolated
house, called the Pest-house, which is set apart for parishioners
who might be suffering from infectious diseases, has been
continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and
is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from
small-pox and fever; that from the 1st April to the 1st September
this year, a period of five months, there have been no fewer than
ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them being in
the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain
the exact number of persons who have suffered from that disease
although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families
keeping it as private as possible."(67*)
    The labourers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid
categories of the British proletariat. The price at which they
buy their wages was shown on an earlier page.(68*) Here I merely
cast a hurried glance over the conditions of their dwellings. As
a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether its owner or his tenant,
builds a number of cottages for his hands. They receive cottages
and coal for firing "for nothing" -- i.e., these form part of
their wages, paid in kind. Those who are not lodged in this way
receive in compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts
attract with rapidity a large population, made up of the miners
themselves, and the artisans, shopkeepers, etc., that group
themselves around them. The ground-rents are high, as they are
generally where population is dense. The master tries, therefore,
to run up, within the smallest space possible at the mouth of the
pit, just so many cottages as are necessary to pack together his
hands and their families. If new mines are opened in the
neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the pressure
increases. In the construction of the cottages, only one point of
view is of moment, the "abstinence" of the capitalist from all
expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable. "The lodging
which is obtained by the pitmen and other labourers connected
with the collieries of Northumberland and Durham," says Dr Julian
Hunter, "is perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the dearest of
which any large specimens can be found in England, the similar
parishes of Monmouthshire excepted.... The extreme badness is in
the high number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the
groundplot on which a great number of houses are thrust, the want
of water, the absence of privies, and the frequent placing of one
house on the top of another, or distribution into flats,... the
lessee acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not
resident."(69*)
    "In pursuance of my instructions," says Dr Stevens, "I
visited most of the large colliery villages in the Durham
Union... With very few exceptions, the general statement that no
means are taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be
true of all of them.... All colliers are bound ['bound,' an
expression which, like bondage, dates from the age of serfdom] to
the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months..... If the
colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the 'viewer,' a
mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at the
annual 'binding,' such men are turned off..... It appears to me
that no part of the 'truck system' could be worse than what
obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is
bound to take as part of his hiring a house surrounded with
pestiferous influences; he cannot help himself, and it appears
doubtful whether anyone else can help him except his proprietor
(he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor
first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably
certain. The collier is also often supplied with water by the
proprietor, which, whether it be good or bad, he has to pay for,
or rather he suffers a deduction for from his wages."(70*)
    In conflict with "public opinion," or even with the Officers
of Health, capital makes no difficulty about "justifying" the
Conditions partly dangerous, partly degrading, to which it
confines the working and domestic life of the labourer, on the
ground that they are necessary for profit. It is the same thing
when capital "abstains" from protective measures against
dangerous machinery in the factory from appliances for
ventilation and for safety in mines, etc. It is the same here
with the housing of the miners. Dr Simon, medical officer of the
Privy Council, in his official Report says: "In apology for the
wretched household accommodation... it is alleged that miners are
commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee's
interest (which in collieries is commonly for 21 years), is not
so long that he should deem it worth his while to create good
accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople and
others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to
act liberally in the matter, this disposition would commonly be
defeated by his landlord's tendency to fix on him, as
ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege of
having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable
village which the labourers of the subterranean property ought to
inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition)
equally excludes others who might desire to build. It would be
foreign to the purpose of this report to enter upon any
discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it
even needful to consider where it would be that, if decent
accommodation were provided, the cost... would eventually fall --
whether on landlord, or lessee, or labourer, or public. But in
presence of such shameful facts as are vouched for in the annexed
reports [those of Dr Hunter, Dr Stevens, etc.] a remedy may well
be claimed..... Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do
great public wrong. The landlord in his capacity of mine-owner
invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate, and then in
his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the
labourers whom he collects, should find proper lodging where they
must live. The lessee [the capitalist exploiter] meanwhile has no
pecuniary motive for resisting that division of the bargain; well
knowing that if its latter conditions be exorbitant, the
consequences fall, not on him, that his labourers on whom they
fall have not education enough to know the value of their
sanitary rights, that neither obscenest lodging nor foulest
drinking water will be appreciable inducements towards a
'strike.'"(71*)

(d) Effect of Crises on the best paid part of the Working-Class

    Before I turn to the regular agricultural labourers, I may be
allowed to show, by one example, how industrial revulsions affect
even the best-paid, the aristocracy, of the working-class. It
will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the great
crises with which the industrial cycle periodically ends. The
next termination of the cycle was due in 1866. Already discounted
in the regular factory districts by the cotton famine, which
threw much capital from its wonted sphere into the great centres
of the money-market, the crisis assumed, at this time, an
especially financial character. Its outbreak in 1866 was
signalised by the failure of a gigantic London Bank, immediately
followed by the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of
the great London branches of industry involved in the catastrophe
was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only
overproduced beyond all measure during the overtrading time, but
they had, besides, engaged in enormous contracts on the
speculation that credit would be forthcoming to an equivalent
extent. Now, a terrible reaction set in, that even at this hour
(the end of March, 1867) continues in this and other London
industries.(72*) To show the condition of the labourers, I quote
the following from the circumstantial report of a correspondent
of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866, and beginning of
1867, visited the chief centres of distress: "In the East End
districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and
Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in
a state of utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were
breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of over
half a year's duration)... I had great difficulty in reaching the
workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it... They were
waiting for their tickets, hut the time had not yet arrived for
the distribution. The yard was a great square place with an open
shed running all round it, and several large heaps of snow
covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also,
were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer
weather the men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were
so snowed up that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy,
however, in the open shed breaking paving-stones into macadam.
Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he chipped away
at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken
up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day's
work, and got his day's pay-threepence and an allowance of food.
In another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden louse,
and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled with men
who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder, for the warmth of
one another's bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and
disputing the while as to which could work the longest on a given
quantity of food-for endurance was the point of honour. Seven
thousand... in this one workhouse... were recipients of relief...
many hundreds of them... it appeared, were, six or eight months
ago, earning the highest wages paid to artisans..... Their number
would be more than doubled by the count of those who, having
exhausted all their savings, still refuse to apply to the parish,
because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the workhouse, I
took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey
houses, that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was
a member of the Committee of the Unemployed..... My first call
was on an ironworker who had been seven and twenty weeks out of
employment. I found the man with his family sitting in a little
back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there was a
fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the
young children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly
cold day. On a tray in front of the fire lay a quantity of oakum,
which the wife and children were picking in return for their
allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of
the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per
day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us
with a melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of
slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea..... The
next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman,
who, without saying a word, led us into a little back parlour, in
which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly
dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness was about these
people and their little room, as I should not care to witness
again. 'Nothing have they done, sir,' said the woman, pointing to
her boys, 'for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone-all
the twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were
better, thinking it would yield a little to keep us when we got
past work. Look at it,' she said, almost fiercely, bringing out a
bank-book with all its well-kept entries of money paid in, and
money taken out, so that we could see how the little fortune had
begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by
little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down
again till the sum in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the
last entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet. This
family received relief from the workhouse, and it furnished them
with just one scanty meal per day.... Our next visit was to an
iron labourer's wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We
found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her
clothes, and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the
bedding had been pawned. Two wretched children were tending her,
themselves looking as much in need of nursing as. their mother.
Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this
pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past,
she moaned as if all her faith in a future that should atone for
it were dead..... On getting outside a young fellow came running
after us, and asked us to step inside his house and see if
anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty
children, a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he
had to show."
    On the after pains of the crisis of 1866, the following
extract from a Tory newspaper. It must not be forgotten that the
East-end of London, which is here dealt with, is not only the
seat of the iron shipbuilding mentioned above, but also of a
so-called "home-industry" always underpaid. "A frightful
spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis.
Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did not parade
with their black flags en masse, the human torrent was imposing
enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying
of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000
of them... In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful
metropolis, are packed -- next door to the most enormous
accumulation of wealth the world ever saw -- cheek by jowl with
this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are
now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving,
they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell
us from their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them
to find work, and useless for them to beg. The local ratepayers
themselves are driven by the parochial charges to the verge of
pauperism." -- (Standard, 5th April, 1867)
    As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote
Belgium as the Paradise of the labourer because "freedom of
labour," or what is the same thing, "freedom of capital," is
there limited neither by the despotism of Trades' Unions, nor by
Factory Acts, a word or two on the "happiness" of the Belgian
labourer. Assuredly no one was more thoroughly initiated in the
mysteries of this happiness than the late M. Ducpetiaux,
inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions,
and member of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let
us take his work: "Budgets economiques des classes ouvrières de
la Belgique," Bruxelles, 1855. Here we find among other matters,
a normal. Belgian labourer's family, whose yearly income and
expenditure he calculates on very exact data, and whose
conditions of nourishment are then compared with those of the
soldier, sailor, and prisoner. The family "consists of father,
mother, and four children." Of these 6 persons "four may be
usefully employed the whole year through." It is assumed that
"there is no sick person nor one incapable of work, among them,"
nor are there "expenses for religious, moral, and intellectual
purposes, except a very small sum for church sittings," nor
"contributions to savings banks or benefit societies," nor
"expenses due to luxury or the result of improvidence." The
father and eldest son, however, allow themselves "the use of
tobacco," and on Sundays "go to the cabaret," for which a whole
86 centimes a week are reckoned. "From a general compilation of
wages allowed to the labourers in different trades, it follows
that the highest average of daily wage is 1 franc 56c., for men,
89 centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and 55 centimes for
girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family would
amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a-year... In the
family... taken as typical we have calculated all possible
resources. But in ascribing wages to the mother of the family we
raise the question of the direction of the household. How will
its internal economy be cared for? Who will look after the young
children? Who will get ready the meals, do the washing and
mending? This is the dilemma incessantly presented to the
labourers."
    According to this the budget of the family is:

The father  300 working-days at fr. 1.56.... fr. 468
The mother  300 working-days at fr.   89.... fr. 267
The boy     300 working-days at fr.   56.... fr. 168
The girl    300 working-days at fr.   55.... fr. 165
                    Total                   fr. 1,068

    The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit
upon the hypothesis that the labourer has the food of:

The man of war's man  fr. 1.828... Deficit fr. 760
The soldier           fr. 1.473... Deficit fr. 405
The prisoner          fr. 1.112... Deficit fr.  44

    "We see that few labouring families can reach, we will not
say the average of the sailor or soldier, but even that of the
prisoner. The general average (of the cost of each prisoner in
the different prisons during the period 1847-1849), has been 63
centimes for all prisons. This figure, compared with that of the
daily maintenance of the labourer, shows a difference of 13
centimes. It must be remarked further, that if in the prisons it
is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of
administration and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners
have not to pay for their lodging; that the purchases they make
at the canteens are not included in the expenses of maintenance,
and that these expenses are greatly lowered in consequence of the
large number of persons that make up the establishments, and of
contracting for or buying wholesale, the food and other things
that enter into their consumption.... How comes it, however, that
a great number, we might say, a great majority, of labourers,
live in a more economical way? It is... by adopting expedients,
the secret of which only the labourer knows; by reducing his
daily rations; by substituting rye-bread for wheat; by eating
less meat, or even none at all, and the same with butter and
condiments; by contenting themselves with one or two rooms where
the family is crammed together, where boys and girls sleep side
by side, often on the same pallet; by economy of clothing,
washing, decency; in, by giving up the Sunday diversions; by,
short, resigning themselves to the most painful privations. Once
arrived at this extreme limit, the least rise in the price of
food, stoppage of work, illness, increases the labourer's
distress and determines his complete ruin; debts accumulate,
credit fails, the most necessary clothes and furniture are
pawned, and finally, the family asks to be enrolled on the list
of paupers." (Ducpetiaux, l.c., pp. 151, 154, 155) In fact, in
this "Paradise of capitalists" there follows, on the smallest
change in the price of the most essential means of subsistence, a
change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See Manifesto of the
Maatschappij: "De Vlamingen Vooruit!!' Brussels, 1860, pp. 15,
16.) In all Belgium are 930,000 families, of whom, according to
the official statistics, 90,000 are wealthy and on the list of
voters = 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the lower
middle-class in towns and villages, the greater part of them
constantly sinking into the proletariat, = 1,950,000 persons.
Finally, 450,000 working-class families = 2,250,000 persons, of
whom the model ones enjoy the happiness depicted by Ducpetiaux.
Of the 450,000 working-class families, over 200,000 are on the
pauper list.

(e) The British Agricultural Proletariat

    Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalistic
production and accumulation assert itself more brutally than in
the progress of English agriculture (including cattle-breeding)
and the retrogression of the English agricultural labourer.
Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid retrospect.
Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the 18th
century, although the revolution in landed property, from which
the changed mode of production starts as a basis, has a much
earlier date.
    If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful
observer, though a superficial thinker, as to the agricultural
labourer of 1771, the latter plays a very pitiable part compared
with his predecessor of the end of the 14th century, "when the
labourer... could live in plenty, and accumulate wealth,"(73*)
not to speak of the 15th century, "the golden age of the English
labourer in town and country." We need not, however, go back so
far. In a very instructive work of the year 1777 we read: "The
great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him [the
gentleman]; while the poor labourer is depressed almost to the
earth. His unfortunate situation will fully appear, by taking a
comparative view of it, only forty years ago, and at present...
Landlord and tenant... have both gone hand in hand in keeping the
labourer down."(74*) It is then proved in detail that the real
agricultural wages between 1737 and 1777 fell nearly 1/4 or 25
per cent.    "Modern policy," says Dr Richard Price also, "is,
indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people; and the
consequences may in time prove that the whole kingdom will
consist of only gentry and beggars, or of grandees and
slaves."(75*)
    Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural
labourer from 1770 to 1780, with regard to his food and dwelling,
as well as to his self-respect, amusements, etc., is an ideal
never attained again since that time. His average wage expressed
in pints of wheat was from 1770 to 1771, 90 pints, in Eden's time
(1797) only 65, in 1808 but 60.(76*)
    The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the
Anti-Jacobin War, during which landed proprietors, farmers,
manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stockbrokers,
army-contractors, etc., enriched themselves so extraordinarily,
has been already indicated above. The nominal wages rose in
consequence partly of the bank-note depreciation, partly of a
rise in the price of the primary means of subsistence independent
of this depreciation. But the actual wage-variation can be
evidenced in a very simple way, without entering into details
that are here unnecessary. The Poor Law and its administration
were in 1795 and 1814 the same. It will be remembered how this
law was carried out in the country districts: in the form of alms
the parish made up the nominal wage to the nominal sum required
for the simple vegetation of the labourer. The ratio between the
wages paid by the farmer, and the wage-deficit made good by the
parish, shows us two things. First, the falling of wages below
their minimum; second, the degree in which the agricultural
labourer was a compound of wage-labourer and pauper, or the
degree in which he had been turned into a serf of his parish. Let
us take one county that represents the average condition of
things in all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average
weekly wage was 7s 6d; the total yearly expenditure of a family
of 6 persons, £36 12s 5d; their total income, £29 18s; deficit
made good by the parish, £6 14s 5d. In 1814, in the same county,
the weekly wage was 12s 2d; the total yearly expenditure of a
family of 5 persons, £54 18s 4d; their total income, £36 2s;
deficit made good by the parish, £18 6s 4d.(77*) In 1795 the
deficit was less than 1/4 the wage, in 1814, more than half. It
is self-evident that, under these circumstances, the meagre
comforts that Eden still found in the cottage of the agricultural
labourer, had vanished by 1814.(78*) Of all the animals kept by
the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was,
thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most
brutally treated.
    The same state of things went on quietly until "the Swing
riots, in 1830, revealed to us (i.e., the ruling classes) by the
light of blazing corn-stacks, that misery and black mutinous
discontent smouldered quite as fiercely under the surface of
agricultural as of manufacturing England."(79*) At this time,
Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the agricultural
labourers "white slaves," and a Bishop echoed the epithet in the
Upper House. The most notable political economist of that period
E.G. Wakefield -- says: "The peasant of the South of England...
is not a freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a pauper."(80*)
    The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new
light on the condition of the agricultural labourers. On the one
hand, it was to the interest of the middle-class agitators to
prove how little the Corn Laws protected the actual producers of
the corn. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie foamed
with sullen rage at the denunciations of the factory system by
the landed aristocracy, at the pretended sympathy with the woes
of the factory operatives, of those utterly corrupt, heartless,
and genteel loafers, and at their "diplomatic zeal" for factory
legislation. It is an old English proverb that "when thieves fall
out, honest men come by their own," and, in fact, the noisy,
passionate quarrel between the two fractions of the ruling class
about the question, which of the two exploited the labourers the
more shamefully, was on each hand the midwife of the truth. Earl
Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was commander-in-chief in the
aristocratic, philanthropic, anti-factory campaign. He was,
therefore, in 1845, a favourite subject in the revelations of the
Morning Chronicle on the condition of the agricultural labourers.
This journal, then the most important Liberal organ, sent special
commissioners into the agricultural districts, who did not
content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics,
but published the names both of the labouring families examined
and of their landlords. The following list gives the wages paid
in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blanford, Wimbourne,
and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr G. Bankes and of
the Earl of Shaftesbury." It will be noted that, just like
Bankes, this "low church pope, this head of English pietists,
pockets a great part of the miserable wages of the labourers
under the pretext of house-rent:--

FIRST VILLAGE

(a) Children; (b) Number of Members of Family; (c) Weekly Wage of
the Men; (d) Weekly Wage of the Children; (e) Weekly Income of
the Whole Family; (f) Weekly Rent; (g) Total weekly wage after
deduction of rent; (h) Weekly income per head.

2; 4; 8s. 0d.; -- ; 8s. 0d.; 2s. 0d.; 0s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.
3; 5; 8s. 0d.; -- ; 8s. 0d.; 1s. 6d.; 6s. 6d.; 1s. 3 1/2d
2; 4; 8s. 0d.; -- ; 8s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 9d.
2; 4; 8s. 0d.; -- ; 8s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 9d.
6; 8; 7s. 0d.; 1s., 1s. 6d.; 10s. 6d.; 2s. 0d.; 8s. 6d.; 1s. 0
1/4d.
3; 5; 7s. 0d.; 1s., 2s.; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 4d.; 5s. 8d.; 1s. 1 1/4d.

SECOND VILLAGE

6; 8; 7s. 0d.; 1s., 1s. 6d.; 10s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.; 8s. 6d.; 1s.
3/4d.
6; 8; 7s. 0d.; 1s., 1s. 6d.; 7s. 0d.; 1s 3 1/2d.; 5s. 8 1/2d.;
0s. 8 1/2d.
8; 10; 7s. 0d.; -- ; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 3 1/2d.; 5s. 8 1/2d.; 0s. 7d.
4; 6; 7s. 0d.; -- ; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 6 1/2d.; 5s. 5 1/2d.; 0s. 11d.
3; 5; 7s. 0d.; -- ; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 6 1/2d.; 5s. 5 1/2d.; 1s. 1d.

THIRD VILLAGE

4; 6; 7s. 0d.; -- ; 7s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.; 6s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.
3; 5; 7s. 0d.; 1s., 2s.; 11s. 6d.; 0s. 10d.; 10s. 8d.; 2s. 1
1/2d.
0; 2; 5s. 0d.; 1s., 2s. 6d.; 5s. 0d.; 1s. 0d.; 4s. 0d.; 2s. 0d.
(81*)

    The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to
English agriculture.(82*) Drainage on the most extensive scale,
new methods of stall-feeding, and of the artificial cultivation
of green crops, introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus,
new treatment of clay soils, increased use of mineral manures,
employment of the steam-engine, and of all kinds of new
machinery, more intensive cultivation generally, characterised
this epoch. Mr Pusey, Chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society,
declares that the (relative) expenses of farming have been
reduced nearly one half by the introduction of new machinery. On
the other hand, the actual return of the soil rose rapidly.
Greater outlay of capital per acre, and, as a consequence, more
rapid concentration of farms, were essential conditions of the
new method.(83*) At the same time, the area under cultivation
increased, from 1846 to 1856, by 464,119 acres, without reckoning
the great area in the Eastern Counties which was transformed from
rabbit warrens and poor pastures into magnificent corn-fields. It
has already been seen that, at the same time, the total number of
persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the actual
agricultural labourers of both sexes and of all ages are
concerned, their number fell from 1,241,396, in 1851, to
1,163,217 in 1861.(84*) If the English Registrar-General,
therefore, rightly remarks: "The increase of farmers and
farm-labourers, since 1801, bears no kind of proportion... to the
increase of agricultural produce,"(85*) this disproportion
obtains much more for the last period, when a positive decrease
of the agricultural population went hand in hand with increase of
the area under cultivation, with more intensive cultivation,
unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated with the
soil, and devoted to its working, an augmentation in the products
of the soil without parallel in the history of English
agriculture, plethoric rent-rolls of landlords, and growing
wealth of the capitalist farmers. If we take this, together with
the swift, unbroken extension of the markets, viz., the towns,
and the reign of Free-trade, then the agricultural labourer was
at last, post tot discrimina rerum, placed in circumstances that
ought, secundum artem, to have made him drunk with happiness.
    But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of
the English agricultural labourer of today, not to speak of his
predecessor in the last half of the 14th and in the 15th century,
but only compared with his predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has
changed for the worse to an extraordinary extent, that "the
peasant has again become a serf," and a serf worse fed and worse
clothed.(86*) Dr Julian Hunter, in his epoch-making report on the
dwellings of the agricultural labourers, says: "The cost of the
hind" (a name for the agricultural labourer, inherited from the
time of serfdom) "is fixed at the lowest possible amount on which
he can live... the supplies of wages and shelter are not
calculated on the profit to be derived from him. He is a zero in
farming calculations.(87*)... The means [of subsistence] being
always supposed to be a fixed quantity.(88*) As to any further
reduction of his income, he may say, nihil habeo nihil curo. He
has no fears for the future, because he has now only the spare
supply necessary to keep him. He has reached the zero from which
are dated the calculations of the farmer. Come what will, he has
no share either in prosperity or adversity."(89*)
    In the year 1863, an official inquiry took place into the
conditions of nourishment and labour of the criminals condemned
to transportation and penal servitude. The results are recorded
in two voluminous Blue books. Among other things it is said:
"From an elaborate comparison between the diet of convicts in the
convict prisons in England, and that of paupers in workhouses and
of free labourers in the same country... it certainly appears
that the former are much better fed than either of the two other
classes,"(90*) whilst "the amount of labour required from an
ordinary convict under penal servitude is about one half of what
would be done by an ordinary day-labourer."(91*) A few
characteristic depositions of witnesses: John Smith, governor of
the Edinburgh prison, deposes: No. 5056. "The diet of the English
prisons [is] superior to that of ordinary labourers in England."
No. 50. "It is the fact... that the ordinary agricultural
labourers in Scotland very seldom get any meat at all." Answer
No. 3047. "Is there anything that you are aware of to account for
the necessity of feeding them very much better than ordinary
labourers? -- Certainly not." No. 3048. "Do you think that
further experiments ought to be made in order to ascertain
whether a dietary might not be hit upon for prisoners employed on
public works nearly approaching to the dietary of free
labourers?"(92*)... "He [the agricultural labourer] might say:, I
work hard, and have not enough to eat, and when in prison I did
not work harder where I had plenty to eat, and therefore it is
better for me to be in prison again than here."'(93*) From the
tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled
the annexed comparative summary.

WEEKLY AMOUNT OF NUTRIMENT  (Ounces)

            Quantity of Nitrogenous Ingredients; Quantity of
Non-Nitrogenous Ingredients; Quantity of Mineral Matter; Total

Portland (convict); 28.95; 150.06; 4.68; 183.69
Sailor in Navy; 29.63; 152.91; 4.52; 187.06
Soldier; 25.55; 114.49; 3.94; 143.98
Working Coachmaker; 24.53; 162.06; 4.23; 190.82
Compositor; 21.24; 100.83; 3.12; 125.19
Agricultural labourer; 17.73; 118.06; 3.29; 120.08 (94*)

    The general result of the inquiry by the medical commission
of 1863, on the food of the lowest fed classes, is already known
to the reader. He will remember that the diet of a great part of
the agricultural labourers' families is below the minimum
necessary "to arrest starvation diseases." This is especially the
case in all the purely rural districts of Cornwall, Devon,
Somerset, Wilts, Stafford, Oxford, Berks, and Herts. "The
nourishment obtained by the labourer himself," says Dr E. Smith,
"is larger than the average quantity indicates, since he eats a
larger share... necessary to enable him to perform his labour...
of food than the other members of the family, including in the
poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon... The quantity of
food obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period
of rapid growth, is in many cases, in almost every county,
deficient, and particularly in nitrogen."(95*) The male and
female servants living with the farmers themselves are
sufficiently nourished. Their number fell from 288,277 in 1851,
to 204,962 in 1861. "The labour of women in the fields," says Dr
Smith, "whatever may be its disadvantages,... is under present
circumstances of great advantage to the family, since it adds
that amount of income which... provides shoes and clothing and
pays the rent, and thus enables the family to be better
fed."(96*) One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was
that the agricultural labourer of England, as compared with other
parts of the United Kingdom, "is considerably the worst fed," as
the appended table shows:
    Quantities of Carbon and Nitrogen weekly consumed by an
average agricultural adult:

          Carbon, grains   Nitrogen, grains
England...      46,673      1,594
Wales...        48,354      2,031
Scotland...     48,980      2,348
Ireland...      43,366      2,434(97*)

    "To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of the
house accommodation generally had," says Dr Simon, in his
official Health Report, "by our agricultural labourers, almost
every page of Dr Hunter's report bears testimony. And gradually,
for many years past, the state of the labourer in these respects
has been deteriorating, house-room being now greatly more
difficult for him to find, and, when found, greatly less suitable
to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been the case.
Especially within the last twenty or thirty years, the evil has
been in very rapid increase, and the household circumstances of
the labourer are now in the highest degree deplorable. Except in
so far as they whom his labour enriches, see fit to treat him
with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly
helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the
land which he contributes to till, whether the house-room which
he gets shall be human or swinish, whether he shall have the
little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his
poverty -- all this does not depend on his willingness and
ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he
requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make
of their, right to do as they will with their own.' However large
may be a farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of
labourers' dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be
upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little
right in that soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and
rain.... An extraneous element weighs the balance heavily against
him.... the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions
concerning settlement and chargeability.(98*) Under this
influence, each parish has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a
minimum the number of its resident labourers: -- for, unhappily,
agricultural labour instead of implying a safe and permanent
independence for the hardworking labourer and his family, implies
for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual
pauperism -- a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so
near, that any illness or temporary failure of occupation
necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief -- and thus
all residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly
an addition to its poor-rates... Large proprietors(99*)... have
but to resolve that there shall be no labourers' dwellings on
their estates, and their estates will thenceforth be virtually
free from half their responsibility for the poor. How far it has
been intended, in the English constitution and law, that this
kind of unconditional property in land should be acquirable, and
that a landlord doing as he wills with his own,, should be able
to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens, whom he may expel
from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to
discuss... For that (power) of eviction... does not exist only in
theory. On a very large scale it prevails in practice-prevails...
as a main governing condition in the household circumstances of
agricultural labour... As regards the extent of the evil, it may
suffice to refer to the evidence which Dr Hunter has compiled
from the last census, that destruction of houses, notwithstanding
increased local demands for them, had, during the last ten years,
been in progress in 821 separate parishes or townships of
England, so that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to
become non-resident (that is in the parishes in which they work),
these parishes and townships were receiving in 1861, as compared 
with 1851, a population 5 1/3 per cent, greater, into house-room
4 1/2 per cent less... When the process of depopulation has
completed itself, the result, says Dr Hunter, is a show-village
where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but
persons who are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers,
are allowed to live. regular servants who receive the good
treatment usual to their class.(100*) But the land requires
cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed
upon it are not the tenants of the owner, but that they come from
a neighbouring open village, perhaps three miles off, where a
numerous small proprietary had received them when their cottages
were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things are
tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand,
testify, in their unrepaired and wretched condition, to the
extinction to which they are doomed. They are seen standing in
the various stages of natural decay. While the shelter holds
together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad enough
he will often be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging.
But no repair, no improvement shall it receive, except such as
its penniless occupants can supply. And when at last it becomes
quite uninhabitable-uninhabitable even to the humblest standard
of serfdom -- it will be but one more destroyed cottage, and
future poor-rates will be somewhat lightened. While great owners
are thus escaping from poor-rates through the depopulation of
lands over which they have control, the nearest town or open
village receive the evicted labourers: the nearest, I say, but
this "nearest" may mean three or four miles distant from the farm
where the labourer has his daily toil. To that daily toil there
will then have to be added, as though it were nothing, the daily
need of walking six or eight miles for power of earning his
bread. And whatever farmwork is done by his wife and children, is
done at the same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil
which the distance occasions him. In the open village,
cottage-speculators buy scraps of land, which they throng as
densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And
into those wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the
open country, have some of the worst features of the worst town
residences) crowd the agricultural labourers of England.(101*)...
Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the
labourer is housed upon the lands which he cultivates, his
household circumstances are generally such as his life of
productive industry would seem to deserve. Even on princely
estates.... his cottage.... may be of the meanest description.
There are landlords who deem any stye good enough for their
labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with
him the hardest possible bargain for rent.(102*) It may be but a
ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no
opening window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden-but the
labourer is helpless against the wrong.... And the Nuisances
Removal Acts.... are.... a mere dead letter... in great part
dependent for their working on such cottage-owners as the one
from whom his (the labourer's) hovel is rented.... From brighter,
but exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of
justice, that attention should again be drawn to the overwhelming
preponderance of facts which are a reproach to the civilisation
of England. Lamentable indeed, must be the case, when,
notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of
the present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of
competent observers that even the general badness of dwellings is
an evil infinitely less urgent than their mere numerical
insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of rural labourers'
dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons
who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent
and moral life. For, again and again in phrases so uniform that
they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic
disease in rural districts, have insisted on the extreme
importance of that over-crowding, as an influence which renders
it a quite hopeless task, to attempt the limiting of any
infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been
pointed out that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences
which there are in country life, the crowding which so favours
the extension of contagious disease, also favours the origination
of disease which is not contagious. And those who have denounced
the over-crowded state of our rural population have not been
silent as to a further mischief. Even where their primary concern
has been only with the injury to health, often almost perforce
they have referred to other relations on the subject. In showing
how frequently it happens that adult persons of both sexes,
married and unmarried, are huddled together in single small
sleeping rooms, their reports have carried the conviction that,
under the circumstances they describe, decency must always be
outraged, and morality almost of necessity must suffer.(103*)
Thus, for instance, in the appendix of my last annual report, Dr
Ord, reporting on an outbreak of fever at Wing, in
Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who had come thither
from Wingrave with fever, "in the first days of his illness slept
in a room with nine other persons. Within a fortnight several of
these persons were attacked, and in the course of a few weeks
five out of the nine had fever, and one died".... From Dr Harvey,
of St. George's Hospital, who, on private professional business,
visited Wing during the time of the epidemic, I received
information exactly in the sense of the above report... "A young
woman having fever, lay at night in a room occupied by her father
and mother, her bastard child, two young men (her brothers), and
her two sisters, each with a bastard child -- 10 persons in all.
A few weeks ago 13 persons slept in it."(104*)
    Dr. Hunter investigated 5,375 cottages of agricultural
labourers, not only in the purely agricultural districts, but in
all counties of England. Of these, 2,195 had only one bedroom
(often at the same time used as living-room), 2,930 only two, and
250, more than two. I will give a few specimens culled from a
dozen counties.

(1) Bedfordshire

    Wrestlingworth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad,
although many are smaller than this. The small, one-storied cots
are often divided by partitions into two bedrooms, one bed
frequently in a kitchen, 5 feet 6 inches in height. Rent, £3 a
year. The tenants have to make their own privies, the landlord
only supplies a hole. As soon as one has made a privy, it is made
use of by the whole neighbourhood. One house, belonging to a
family called Richardson, was of quite unapproachable beauty.
"Its plaster walls bulged very like a lady's dress in a curtsey.
One gable end was convex, the other concave, and on this last,
unfortunately, stood the chimney, a curved tube of clay and wood
like an elephant's trunk. A long stick served as prop to prevent
the chimney from falling. The doorway and window were
rhomboidal." Of 17 houses visited, only 4 had more than one
bedroom, and those four over-crowded. The cots with one bedroom
sheltered 3 adults and 3 children, a married couple with 6
children, etc.
    Dunton. High rents, from £4 to £5; weekly wages of the man,
10s. They hope to pay the rent by the straw-plaiting of the
family. The higher the rent, the greater the number that must
work together to pay it. Six adults, living with 4 children in
one sleeping apartment, pay £3 10s for it. The cheapest house in
Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad, let for £3. Only one
of the houses investigated had 2 bedrooms. A little outside the
village, a house whose "tenants dunged against the house-side,"
the lower 9 inches of the door eaten away through sheer
rottenness; the doorway, a single opening closed at night by a
few bricks, ingeniously pushed up after shutting and covered with
some matting. Half a window, with glass and frame, had gone the
way of all flesh. Here, without furniture, huddled together were
3 adults and 5 children. Dunton is not worse than the rest of
Biggleswade Union.

(2) Berkshire

    Beenham. In June, 1864, a man, his wife and 4 children lived
in a cot (one-storied cottage). A daughter came home from service
with scarlet fever. She died. One child sickened and died. The
mother and one child were down with typhus when Dr Hunter was
called in. The father and one child slept outside, but the
difficulty of securing isolation was seen here, for in the
crowded market of the miserable village lay the linen of the
fever-stricken household, waiting for the wash. The rent of H.'s
house, 1s. a week; one bedroom for man, wife, and 6 children. One
house let for 8d. a-week, 14 feet 6 inches long, 7 feet broad,
kitchen, 6 feet high, the bedroom without window, fire-place,
door, or opening, except into the lobby. no garden. A man lived
here for a little while, with two grown-up daughters and one
grown-up son; father and son slept on the bed, the girls in the
passage. Each of the latter had a child while the family was
living here, but one went to the workhouse for her confinement
and then came home.

(3) Buckinghamshire

    30 cottages-on 1,000 acres of land -- contained here about
130-140 persons. The parish of Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres;
it numbered, in 1851, 36 houses and a population of 84 males and
54 females. This inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in
1861, when they numbered 98 males and 87 females; increase in 10
years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile, the number of houses was
one less.
    Winslow. Great part of this newly built in good style; demand
for houses appears very marked, since very miserable cots let at
1s to 1s 3d per week.
    Water Eaton. Here the landlords, in view of the increasing
population, have destroyed about 20 per cent of the existing
houses. A poor labourer, who had to go about 4 miles to his work,
answered the question, whether he could not find a cot nearer:
"No; they know better than to take a man in with my large
family."
    Tinker's End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were 4 adults
and 4 children; 11 feet long, 9 feet broad, 6 feet 5 inches high
at its highest part; another 11 feet 3 inches by 9 feet, 5 feet
10 inches high, sheltered 6 persons. Each of these families had
less space than is considered necessary for a convict. No house
had more than one bedroom, not one of them a back-door; water
very scarce; weekly rent from 1s 4d to 2s. In 16 of the houses
visited, only 1 man that earned 10s a-week. The quantity of air
for each person under the circumstances just described
corresponds to that which he would have if he were shut up in a
box of 4 feet measuring each way, the whole night. But then, the
ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional
ventilation.

(4) Cambridgeshire

    Gamblingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the
wretchedest cots to be found anywhere. Much straw-plaiting. "A
deadly lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth," reigns in
Gamblingay. The neglect in its centre, becomes mortification at
its extremities, north and south, where the houses are rotting to
pieces. The absentee landlords bleed this poor rookery too
freely. The rents are very high; 8 or 9 persons packed in one
sleeping apartment, in 2 cases 6 adults, each with 1 or 2
children in one small bedroom.

(5) Essex

    In this county, diminutions in the number of persons and of
cottages go, in many parishes, hand in hand. In not less than 22
parishes, however, the destruction of houses has not prevented
increase of population, or has not brought about that expulsion
which, under the name "migration to towns," generally occurs. In
Fingringhoe, a parish of 3,443 acres, were in 1851, 145 houses;
in 1861, only 110. But the people did not wish to go away, and
managed even to increase under these circumstances. In 1851, 252
persons inhabited 61 houses, but in 1861, 262 persons were
squeezed into 49 houses. In Basilden, in 1851, 157 persons lived
on 1,827 acres, in 35 houses; at the end of ten years, 180
persons in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South
Farnbridge, Widford, Basilden, and Ramsden Crags, in 1851, 1,392
persons were living on 8,449 acres in 316 houses; in 1861, on the
same area, 1,473 persons in 249 houses.

(6) Herefordshire

    This little county has suffered more from the "eviction
spirit" than any other in England. At Nadby, over-crowded
cottages generally, with only 2 bedrooms, belonging for the most
part to the farmers. They easily let them for £3 or £4 a-year,
and paid a weekly wage of 9s.

(7) Huntingdon

    Hartford had, in 1851, 87 houses; shortly after this, 19
cottages were destroyed in this small parish of 1,720 acres;
population in 1831, 452; in 1852, 832; and in 1861, 341. 14
cottages, each with 1 bedroom, were visited. In one, a married
couple, 3 grown-up sons, 1 grown-up daughter, 4 children-in all
10; in another, 3 adults, 6 children. One of these rooms, in
which inches long, 12 feet 2 inches broad, 8 people slept, was 12
feet 10; 6 feet 9 inches high: the average, without making any
deduction for projections into the apartment, gave about 130
cubic feet per head. In the 14 sleeping rooms, 34 adults and 33
children. These cottages are seldom provided with gardens, but
many of the inmates are able to farm small allotments at 10s or
12s per rood. These allotments are at a distance from the houses,
which are without privies. The family "must either go to the
allotment to deposit their ordures," or, as happens in this
place, saving your presence, "use a closet with a trough set like
a drawer in a chest of drawers, and drawn out weekly and conveyed
to the allotment to be emptied where its contents were wanted."
In Japan, the circle of life-conditions moves more decently than
this.

(8) Lincolnshire

    Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright's house, with his wife,
her mother, and 5 children; the house has a front kitchen,
scullery, bedroom over the front kitchen; front kitchen and
bedroom, 12 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches; the whole ground
floor, 21 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The bedroom is a
garret; the walls run together into the roof like a sugar-loaf, a
dormer-window opening in front. "Why did he live. here? On
account of the garden? No; it is very small. Rent? High, 1s 3d
per week. Near his work? No; 6 miles away, so that he walks
daily, to and fro, 12 miles. He lived there, because it was a
tenantable cot," and because he wanted to have a cot for himself
alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The
following are the statistics of 12 houses in Langtoft, with 12
bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36 children.

TWELVE HOUSES IN LANGTOFT.

Houses; Bedrooms; Adults; Children; Number of Persons

No. 1; 1; 3; 5; 8
No. 2; 1; 4; 3; 7
No. 3; 1; 4; 4; 8
No. 4; 1; 5; 4; 9
No. 5; 1; 2; 2; 4
No. 6; 1; 5; 3; 8
No. 7; 1; 3; 3; 6
No. 8; 1; 3; 2; 5
No. 9; 1; 2; 0; 2
No. 10; 1; 2; 3; 5
No. 11; 1; 3; 3; 6
No. 12; 1; 2; 4; 6

(9) Kent

    Kennington, very seriously over-populated in 1859, when
diphtheria appeared, and the parish doctor instituted a medical
inquiry into the condition of the poorer classes. He found that
in this locality, where much labour is employed, various cots had
been destroyed and no new ones built. In one district stood four
houses, named birdcages; each had 4 rooms of the following
dimensions in feet and inches:

Kitchen: 9 ft 5 by 8 ft 11 by 6 ft 6.
Scullery: 8 ft 6 by 4 ft 6 by 6 ft 6.
Bedroom: 8 ft 5 by 5 ft 10 by 6 ft 3.
Bedroom: 8 ft 3 by 8 ft 4 by 6 ft 3.

(10) Northamptonshire

    Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the
winter 20-30 men were lounging about the streets from want of
work. The farmers do not always till sufficiently the corn and
turnip lands, and the landlord has found it best to throw all his
farms together into 2 or 3. Hence want of employment. Whilst on
one side of the wall, the land calls for labour, on the other
side the defrauded labourers are casting at it longing glances.
Feverishly over-worked in summer, and half-starved in winter, it
is no wonder if they say in their peculiar dialect, "the parson
and gentlefolk seem frit to death at them."
    At Floore, instances, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of
couples with 4, 5, 6 children; 3 adults with 5 children; a couple
with grandfather and 6 children down with scarlet fever, etc.; in
two houses with two bedrooms, two families of 8 and 9 adults
respectively.

(11) Wiltshire

    Stratton. 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom.
Pentill, in the same parish: a cot let at 1s 3d weekly with 4
adults and 4 children, had nothing good about it, except the
walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of stones to the roof
of worn-out thatch.

(12) Worcestershire

    House-destruction here not quite so excessive; yet from 1851
to 1861, the number of inhabitants to each house on the average,
has risen from 4.2 to 4.6.
    Badsey. Many cots and little gardens here. Some of the
farmers declare that the cots are "a great nuisance here, because
they bring the poor." On the statement of one gentleman: "The
poor are none the better for them; if you build 500 they will let
fast enough, in fact, the more you build, the more they want"
(according to him the houses give birth to the inhabitants, who
then by a law of Nature press on "the means of housing"). Dr
Hunter remarks: "Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as
there is no particular attraction, such as Doles, at Badsey, it
must be repulsion from some other unfit place, which will send
them here. If each could find an allotment near his work, he
would not prefer Badsey, where he pays for his scrap of ground
twice as much as the farmer pays for his."
    The continual emigration to the towns, the continual
formation of surplus-population in the country through the
concentration of farms, conversion of arable land into pasture,
machinery, etc., and the continual eviction of the agricultural
population by the destruction of their cottages, go hand in hand.
The more empty the district is of men, the greater is its
"relative surplus-population," the greater is their pressure on
the means of employment, the greater is the absolute excess of
the agricultural population over the means for housing it, the
greater, therefore, in the villages is the local
surplus-population and the most pestilential packing together of
human beings. The packing together of knots of men in scattered
little villages and small country towns corresponds to the
forcible draining of men from the surface of the land. The
continuous superseding of the agricultural labourers, in spite of
their diminishing number and the increasing mass of their
products, gives birth to their pauperism. Their pauperism is
ultimately a motive to their eviction and the chief source of
their miserable housing which breaks down their last power of
resistance, and makes them mere slaves of the landed proprietors
and the farmers.(105*) Thus the minimum of wages becomes a law of
Nature to them. On the other hand, the land, in spite of its
constant "relative surplus-population," is at the same time
under-populated. This is seen, not only locally at the points
where the efflux of men to towns, mines, railroad-making, etc.,
is most marked. It is to be seen everywhere, in harvest-time as
well as in spring and summer, at those frequently recurring times
when English agriculture, so careful and intensive, wants extra
hands. There are always too many agricultural labourers for the
ordinary, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary
needs of the cultivation of the soil.1 Hence we find in the
official documents contradictory complaints from the same places
of deficiency and excess of labour simultaneously. The temporary
or local want of labour brings about no rise in wages, but a
forcing of the women and children into the fields, and
exploitation at an age constantly lowered. As soon as the
exploitation of the women and children takes place on a larger
scale it becomes in turn a new means of making a
surplus-population of the male agricultural labourer and of
keeping down his wage. In the east of England thrives a beautiful
fruit of this vicious circle -- the so-called gang-system, to
which I must briefly return here.(106*)
    The gang-system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of
Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottingham,
here and there in the neighbouring counties of Northampton,
Bedford, and Rutland. Lincolnshire will serve us as an example. A
large part of this county is new land, marsh formerly, or even,
as in others of the eastern counties just named, won lately from
the sea. The steam-engine has worked wonders in the way of
drainage. What were once fens and sandbanks, bear now a luxuriant
sea of corn and the highest of rents. The same thing holds of the
alluvial lands won by human endeavour, as in the island of
Axholme and other parishes on the banks of the Trent. In
proportion as the new farms arose, not only were no new cottages
built: old ones were demolished, and the supply of labour had to
come from open villages, miles away, by long roads that wound
along the sides of the hills. There alone had the population
formerly found shelter from the incessant floods of the
winter-time. The labourers that dwell on the farms of 400-1,000
acres (they are called "confined labourers") are solely employed
on such kinds of agricultural work as is permanent, difficult,
and carried on by aid of horses. For every 100 acres there is, on
an average, scarcely one cottage. A fen farmer, e.g., gave
evidence before the Commission of Inquiry: "I farm 320 acres, all
arable land. I have not one cottage on my farm. I have only one
labourer on my farm now. I have four horsemen lodging about. We
get light work done by gangs."(107*) The soil requires much light
field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain processes of
manuring, removing of stones, etc. This is done by the gangs, or
organised bands that dwell in the open villages.
    The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young
persons of both sexes (13-18 years of age, although the boys are
for the most part eliminated at the age of 13), and children of
both sexes (6-13 years of age). At the head is the gang-master,
always an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is
called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a
dash of enterprise and savoir faire. He is the
recruiting-sergeant for the gang, which works under him, not
under the farmer. He generally arranges with the latter for
piece-work, and his income, which on the average is not very much
above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer,(108*) depends
almost entirely upon the dexterity with which he manages to
extract within the shortest time the greatest possible amount of
labour from his gang. The farmers have discovered that women work
steadily only under the direction of men, but that women and
children, once set going, impetuously spend their life-force --
as Fourier knew -- while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough
to economise his as much as he can. The gang-master goes from one
farm to another, and thus employs his gang from 6 to 8 months in
the year. Employment by him is, therefore, much more lucrative
and more certain for the labouring families, than employment by
the individual farmer, who only employs children occasionally.
This circumstance so completely rivets his influence in the open
villages that children are generally only to be hired through his
instrumentality. The lending out of these individually,
independently of the gang, is his second trade.
    The "drawbacks" of the system are the over-work of the
children and young persons, the enormous marches that they make
daily to and from the farms, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 miles distant,
finally, the demoralisation of the gang. Although the
gang-master, who, in some districts is called "the driver," is
armed with a long stick, he uses it but seldom, and complaints of
brutal treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic emperor, or
a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular
with his subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of
the gipsy life under his direction. Coarse freedom, a noisy
jollity, and obscenest impudence give attractions to the gang.
Generally the gangmaster pays up in a public house; then he
returns home at the head of the procession reeling drunk, dropped
up right and left by a stalwart virago, while children and young
persons bring up the rear, boisterous, and singing chaffing and
bawdy songs. On the return journey what Fourier calls
"phanerogamie," is the order of the day. The getting with child
of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions of the same age,
is common. The open villages which supply the contingent of the
gang, become Sodoms and Gomorrahs,(109*) and have twice as high a
rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the kingdom. The moral
character of girls bred in these schools, when married women, was
shown above. Their children, when opium does not give them the
finishing stroke, are born recruits of the gang.
    The gang in its classical form just described, is called the
public, common, or tramping gang. For there are also private
gangs. These are made up in the same way as the common gang, but
count fewer members, and work, not under a gang-master, but under
some old farm servant, whom the farmer does not know how to
employ in any better way. The gipsy fun has vanished here, but
according to all witnesses, the payment and treatment of the
children is worse.
    The gang-system, which during the last years has steadily
increased,(110*) clearly does not exist for the sake of the
gang-master. It exists for the enrichment of the large
farmers,(111*) and indirectly of the landlords.(112*) For the
farmer there is no more ingenious method of keeping his labourers
well below the normal level, and yet of always having an extra
hand ready for extra work, of extracting the greatest possible
amount of labour with the least possible amount of money,(113*)
and of making adult male labour "redundant." From the exposition
already made, it will be understood why, on the one hand, a
greater or less lack of employment for the agricultural labourer
is admitted, while on the other, the gang-system is at the same
time declared "necessary" on account of the want of adult male
labour and its migration to the towns.(114*) The cleanly weeded
land, and the uncleanly human weeds, of Lincolnshire, are pole
and counterpole of capitalistic production.(115*)

(f) Ireland

    In concluding this section, we must travel for a moment to
Ireland. First, the main facts of the case.
    The population of Ireland had, in 1841, reached 8,222,664; in
1851, it had dwindled to 6,623,985; in 1861, to 5,850,309; in
1866, to 5 1/2 millions, nearly to its level in 1801. The
diminution began  with the famine year, 1846, so that Ireland, in
less than twenty years, lost more than 5/16ths of its
people.(116*) 

    Table A.

Year; Horses: Total Number; Change; Cattle: Total Number; Change;
Sheep: Total Number; Change; Pigs: Total Number; Change

1860; 619,811;    -- ; 3,606,374;    --  ; 3,542,080;  -- ;
1,271,072; --
1861; 614,232;  -5,993; 3,471,688; -138,316; 3,556,050; 13,970;
1,102,042; -169,030
1862; 602,894; -11,338; 3,254,890; -216,798; 3,456,132; -99,913;
1,154,324; 52,282
1863; 579,978; -22,916; 3,144,231; -110,695; 3,308,204; -147,982;
1,067,458; -86,866
1864; 562,158; -17,820; 3,262,294; 118,063; 3,366,941; 53,737;
1,058,480; -8,978
1865; 547,867; -14,291; 3,493,414; 231,120; 3,088,742; 321,801;
1,299,892; 241,413

Its total emigration from May, 1851, to July 1865, numbered
1,591,487: the emigration during the years 1861-1865 was more
than half-a-million. The number of inhabited houses fell, from
1851-1861, by 52,990. From 1851-1861, the number of holdings of
15 to 30 acres increased 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres,
109,000, whilst the total number of all farms fell 120,000, a
fall, therefore, solely due to the suppression of farms under 15
acres -- i.e., to their centralisation.
    The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a
decrease in the mass of products. For our purpose, it suffices to
consider the 5 years from 1861-1865 during which over
half-a-million emigrated, and the absolute number of people sank
by more than 1/3 of a million.
    From the above table it results: --

Horses: Absolute Decrease; 72,358
Cattle: Absolute Decrease; 116,625
Sheep: Absolute Increase; 146,608
Pigs: Absolute Increase; 28,819 (117*)

    Let us now turn to agriculture, which yields the means of
subsistence for cattle and for men. In the following table is
calculated the decrease or increase for each separate year, as
compared with its immediate predecessor. The Cereal Crops include
wheat, oats, barley, rye, beans, and peas; the Green Crops,
potatoes, turnips, mangolds, beet-root, cabbages, carrots,
parsnips, vetches, etc.

Table B

Increase or Decrease in the Area Under Crops and Grass in Acerage

Year; Cereal Crops; Green Crops; Grass and Clover; Flax; Total
Cultivated Land

1861; -15,701; -36,974; -47,060; 19,271; -81,873
1862; -72,734; -74,785; 6,623; 2,055; -139,841
1863; -144,719; -19,358; 7,724; 63,922; -92,431
1864; -122,437; -2,317; 47,486; 87,761; 10,403
1865; -72,450; 25,241; 69,970; -50,150; -18,218

1861-5; -438,041; -107,984; 82,834; 122,850; -330,860

    In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the
heading "grass land," chiefly because the area under the heading
of "bog and waste unoccupied," decreased by 101,544 acres. If we
compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667
qrs., of which 48,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley,
etc.: the decrease in potatoes was 446,498 tons, although the
area of their cultivation increased in 1865.

Table C

Increase or Decrease in the Area Under Cultivation, Product per
Acre, and Total Product of 1865 Compared with 1864.

Product; Acres of Land Cultivated (1864, 1865); Change; Product
per Acre; Change; Total Product

Wheat: 276,483, 266,989; -9,494; 13.3 cwt., 13.0 cwt.; -0.3;
875,782 Qrs., 826,783 Qrs.; -48,999 Qrs.
Oats: 1,814,886, 1,745,228; -69,658; 12.1 cwt., 12.3 cwt; 0.2;
7,826,332 Qrs., 7,659,727 Qrs.; -166,605 Qrs.
Barley: 172,700, 177,102; 4,402; 15.9 cwt., 14.9 cwt.; -1.0;
761,909 Qrs., 732,017 Qrs.; 29,892 Qrs.
Bere: 8,864, 10,001; 1,197; 16.4 cwt., 14.8 cwt.; -1.6 cwt.;
15,160 Qrs., 13,989 Qrs.; -1,171 Qrs.
Rye:  -- , -- ; -- ; 8.5 cwt., 10.4 cwt.; 1.9 cwt.; 12,680 Qrs.,
18,364 Qrs.; 5,684 Qrs.
Potatoes: 1,039,724, 1,066,260; 26,536; 4.1 tons, 3.8 tons, 0.5
tons; 4,312,388 tons, 3,865,990 tons; -446,398 tons
Turnips: 337,355, 334,212; -3,143; 10.3 tons, 9.9 tons; -0.4;
3,467,659 tons, 3,301,683 tons; -165,976 tons
Mangold-wurzel: 14,073, 14,839; 816; 10.5 tons, 13.3 tons; 2.8
tons; 147,284 tons, 191,937 tons; 44,658 tons
Cabbages: 31,821, 33, 622; 1,801; 9.3 tons, 10.4 tons; 1.1 tons;
297,875 tons, 350,252 tons; 52,877 tons
Flax: 301,693, 251,433; -50,260; 34.2 stones, 25.2 stones; -9.0
stones; 64,506 stones, 39,561 stones; -24,945 stones
Hay: 1,609,569, 1,678,493; 68,924; 1.6 tons, 1.8 tons; 0.2;
2,607,153 tons, 3,069,707 tons; 461,554 tons

Rye acerage is included in Bere acerage

The data off the text are put together from the materials of the
"Agricultural Statistics, Ireland, General Abstracts, Dublin,"
for the years 1860 et seq., and "Agricultural Statistics,
Ireland. Tables showing the estimated average produce, etc.,
Dublin, 1866." These statistics are official, and laid before
Parliament annually. [Note to 2nd edition. The official
statistics for the year 1872 show, as compared with 1871, a
decrease in area under cultivation off 134,915 acres. An increase
occurred in the cultivation of green crops, turnips,
mangold-wurzel, and the like; a decrease in the area under
cultivation for wheat of 16,000 acres; oats, 14,000; barley and
rye, 4,000; potatoes, 66,632; flax, 34,667; grass, clover,
vetches, rape-seed, 30,000. The soil under cultivation for wheat
shows for the last five years the following stages of decrease:
-- 1868, 285,000 acres; 1869, 280,000; 1870, 259,000; 1871,
244,000; 1872, 228,000. For 1872 we find, in round numbers, an
increase off 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep,
and a decrease of 236,000 pigs.]

    From the movement of population and the agricultural produce
of Ireland, we pass to the movement in the purse of its
landlords, larger farmers, and industrial capitalists. It is
reflected in the rise and fall of the Income-tax. It may be
remembered that Schedule D (profits with the exception of those
of farmers), includes also the so-called, "professional" profits
-- i.e., the incomes of lawyers, doctors, etc.; and the Schedules
C. and E., in which no special details are given, include the
incomes of employees, officers, State sinecurists, State
fundholders, etc.

Table D

The Income Tax on the Subjoined Incomes In Pounds Sterling.

    1860, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865.

Schedule A
Rent of Land; 13,893,829; 13,003,554; 13,398,938; 13,494,991;
13,470,700; 13,801,616

Schedule B
Farmers' Profits; 2,765,387; 2,773,644; 2,937,899; 2,938,823;
2,030,874; 2,046,072

Schedule D
Industrial, etc. Profits; 4,891,652; 4,838,800; 4,846,407;
4,546,147; 4,850,199

Total Schedules
A to E; 22,962,835; 22,993,394; 23,597,574; 23,658,631;
23,236,293; 23,930,340 (118*)

    Under Schedule D. the average annual increase of income from
1853-1864 was only 0.93; whilst, in the same period, in Great
Britain, it was 4.58. The following table shows the distribution
of the profits (with the exception of those of farmers) for the
years 1864 and 1865: --

Table E

Schedule D Income from Profits (over £60) in Ireland

1864

Total yearly income of;  4,368,610 divided among 17,467 persons
Yearly income over £60 and under £100; 238,626 " 5,015
Of the yearly total income; 1,979,066 " 11,321
Remainder of the total yearly income; 2,150,818 " 1,131
Of these; 1,083,906 " 910
          1,066,912 " 121
            430,535 " 105
            646,377 "  26
            262,610 "   3

1865

Total yearly income of;  4,669,979 divided among 18,081 persons
Yearly income over £60 and under £100; 222,575 " 4,703
Of the yearly total income; 2,028,471 " 12,184
Remainder of the total yearly income; 2,418,933 " 1,194
Of these; 1,097,937 " 1,044
          1,320,996 "   186
            584,459 "   122
            736,448 "    28
            264,528 "     3 (119*)

    England, a country with fully developed capitalist
production, and pre-eminently industrial, would have bled to
death with such a drain of population as Ireland has suffered.
But Ireland is at present only an agricultural district of
England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which
it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.
    The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out
of cultivation, has greatly diminished the produce of the
soil,(120*) and, in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle
breeding, has brought about, in some of its branches, an absolute
diminution, in others, an advance scarcely worthy of mention, and
constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, with the
fall in numbers of the population, rents and farmers' profits
rose, although the latter not as steadily as the former. The
reason of this is easily comprehensible. On the one hand, with
the throwing of small holdings into large ones, and the change of
arable into pasture land, a larger part of the whole produce was
transformed into surplus-produce. The surplus-produce increased,
although the total produce, of which it formed a fraction,
decreased. On the other hand, the money-value of this
surplus-produce increased yet more rapidly than its mass, in
consequence of the rise in the English market-price of meat,
wool, etc., during the last 20, and especially during the last
10, years.
    The scattered means of production that serve the producers
themselves as means of employment and of subsistence, without
expanding their own value by the incorporation of the labour of
others, are no more capital than a product consumed by its own
producer is a commodity. If, with the mass of the population,
that of the means of production employed in agriculture also
diminished, the mass of the capital employed in agriculture
increased, because a part of the means of production that were
formerly scattered, was concentrated and turned into capital.
    The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in
industry and trade, accumulated during the last two decades
slowly, and with great and constantly recurring fluctuations; so
much the more rapidly did the concentration of its individual
constituents develop. And, however small its absolute increase,
in proportion to the dwindling population it had increased
largely.
    Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a
process is revealed, than which nothing more excellent could be
wished for by orthodox economy for the support of its dogma: that
misery springs from absolute surplus-population, and that
equilibrium is re-established by depopulation. This is a far more
important experiment than was the plague in the middle of the
14th century so belauded of Malthusians. Note further: If only
the naïvete of the schoolmaster could apply, to the conditions of
production and population of the nineteenth century, the standard
of the 14th, this naïvete, into the bargain, overlooked the fact
that whilst, after the plague and the decimation that accompanied
it, followed on this side of the Channel, in England,
enfranchisement and enrichment of the agricultural population, on
that side, in France, followed greater servitude and more
misery.(121*)
    The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people,
but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it
did not the slightest damage. The exodus of the next 20 years, an
exodus still constantly increasing, did not, as, e.g., the Thirty
Years' War, decimate, along with the human beings, their means of
production. Irish genius discovered an altogether new way of
spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of
its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United States, send
home sums of money every year as travelling expenses for those
left behind. Every troop that emigrates one year, draws another
after it the next. Thus, instead of costing Ireland anything,
emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches of its export
trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply
make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every
year more people than are replaced by the births, so that the
absolute level of the population falls year by year.(122*)
    What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left
behind and freed from the surplus-population? That the relative
surplus-population is today as great as before 1846; that wages
are just as low, that the oppression of the labourers has
increased, that misery is forcing the country towards a new
crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture has
kept pace with emigration. The production of relative
surplus-population has more than kept pace with the absolute
depopulation. A glance at table C shows that the change of arable
to pasture land must work yet more acutely in Ireland than in
England. In England the cultivation of green crops increases with
the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. Whilst a large
number of acres, that were formerly tilled, lie idle or are
turned permanently into grass-land, a great part of the waste
land and peat bogs that were unused formerly, become of service
for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller and medium
farmers -- I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more
than 100 acres -- still make up about 8/10ths of the whole
number.(123*) They are, one after the other, and with a degree of
force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an
agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually
furnish new recruits to the class of wage-labourers. The one
great industry of Ireland, linen-manufacture, requires relatively
few adult men and only employs altogether, in spite of its
expansion since the price of cotton rose in 1861-1866, a
comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like all
other great modern industries, it constantly produces, by
incessant fluctuations, a relative surplus-population within its
own sphere, even with an absolute increase in the mass of human
beings absorbed by it. The misery of the agricultural population
forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories, whose armies of
labourers are, for the most part, scattered over the country.
Here, we encounter again the system described above of domestic
industry, which in underpayment and over-work, possesses its own
systematic means for creating supernumerary labourers. Finally,
although the depopulation has not such destructive consequences
as would result in a country with fully developed capitalistic
production, it does not go on without constant reaction upon the
home-market. The gap which emigration causes here, limits not
only the local demand for labour, but also the incomes of small
shopkeepers, artisans, tradespeople generally. Hence the
diminution in incomes between £60 and £100 in Table E.
    A clear statement of the condition of the agricultural
labourers in Ireland is to be found in the Reports of the Irish
Poor Law Inspectors (1870).(124*) Officials of a government which
is maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege, now open,
now disguised, they have to observe all the precautions of
language that their colleagues in England disdain. In spite of
this, however, they do not let their government cradle itself in
illusions. According to them the rate of wages in the country,
still very low, has within the last 20 years risen 50-60 per
cent, and stands now, on the average, at 6s to 9s per week. But
behind this apparent rise, is hidden an actual fall in wages, for
it does not correspond at all to the rise in price of the
necessary means of subsistence that has taken place in the
meantime. For proof, the following extract from the official
accounts of an Irish workhouse.

            Average Weekly Cost Per Head

Year ended: 29th Sept. 1849; Provisions and Necessities 1s 3
1/4d; Clothing 3d; Total 1s 6 1/4d.
Year ended: 29th Sept. 1869; Provisions and Necessities 2s 7
1/4d; Clothing 6d; Total 3s 1 1/4d.

The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore
fully twice, and that of clothing exactly twice, as much as they
were 20 years before.
    Even apart from this disproportion, the mere comparison of
the rate of wages expressed in gold would give a result far from
accurate. Before the famine, the great mass of agricultural wages
were paid in kind, only the smallest part in money; today,
payment in money is the rule. From this it follows that, whatever
the amount of the real wage, its money rate must rise. "Previous
to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin.... with a rood, or
half-acre or acre of land, and facilities for... a crop of
potatoes. He was able to rear his pig and keep fowl... But they
now have to buy bread, and they have no refuse upon which they
can feed a pig or fowl, and they have consequently no benefit
from the sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs."(125*) In fact, formerly,
the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the small
farmers, and formed for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the
medium and large farms on which they found employment. Only since
the catastrophe of 1846 have they begun to form a fraction of the
class of purely wage labourers, a special class, connected with
its wage-masters only by monetary relations.
    We know what were the conditions of their dwellings in 1846.
Since then they have grown yet worse. A part of the agricultural
labourers which, however, grows less day by day, dwells still on
the holdings of the farmers in over-crowded huts, whose
hideousness far surpasses the worst that the English agricultural
labourers offered us in this way. And this holds generally with
the exception of certain tracts of Ulster; in the south, in the
counties of Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, etc.; in the east, in
Wicklow, Wexford, etc.; in the centre of Ireland, in King's and
Queen's County, Dublin, etc.; in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon,
Mayo, Galway, etc. "The agricultural labourers' huts," an
inspector cries out, "are a disgrace to the Christianity and to
the civilisation of this country."(126*) In order to increase the
attractions of these holes for the labourers, the pieces of land
belonging thereto from time immemorial, are systematically
confiscated. "The mere sense that they exist subject to this
species of ban, on the part of the landlords and their agents,
has... given birth in the minds of the labourers to corresponding
sentiments of antagonism and dissatisfaction towards those by
whom they are thus led to regard themselves as being treated
as... a proscribed race."(127*)
    The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep
away the huts situated on the field of labour. This was done on
the largest scale, and as if in obedience to a command from on
high. Thus many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in
villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into
garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums.
Thousands of Irish families, who according to the testimony of
the English, eaten up as these are with national prejudice, are
notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for
their gaiety and the purity of their home-life, found themselves
suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now
obliged to seek work of the neighbouring farmers and are only
hired by the day, and therefore under the most precarious form of
wage. Hence "they sometimes have long distances to go to and from
work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not unfrequently
ending in sickness, disease and want."(128*)
    "The towns have had to receive from year to year what was
deemed to be the surplus-labour of the rural division;(129*) and
then people still wonder "there is still a surplus of labour in
the towns and villages, and either a scarcity or a threatened
scarcity in some of the country divisions."(130*) The truth is
that this want only becomes perceptible "in harvest-time, or
during spring, or at such times as agricultural operations are
carried on with activity'. at other periods of the year many
hands are idle;"(131*) that "from the digging out of the main
crop of potatoes in October until the early spring following...
there is no employment for them;"(132*) and further, that during
the active times they "are subject to broken days and to all
kinds of interruptions."(133*)
    These results of the agricultural revolution -- i.e., the
change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the
most rigorous economy of labour, etc., are still further
aggravated by the model landlords, who, instead of spending their
rents in other countries, condescend to live in Ireland on their
demesnes. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be
broken, these gentlemen draw their "labour-supply... chiefly from
their small tenants, who are obliged to attend when required to
do the landlord's work, at rates of wages, in many instances,
considerably under the current rates paid to ordinary labourers,
and without regard to the inconvenience or loss to the tenant of
being obliged to neglect his own business at critical periods of
sowing or reaping."(134*)
    The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant
return and long duration of gluts of labour, all these symptoms
of a relative surplus-population, figure therefore in the reports
of the Poor Law administration, as so many hardships of the
agricultural proletariat. It will be remembered that we met, in
the English agricultural proletariat, with a similar spectacle.
But the difference is that in England, an industrial country, the
industrial reserve recruits itself from the country districts,
whilst in Ireland, an agricultural country, the agricultural
reserve recruits itself from the towns, the cities of refuge of
the expelled agricultural labourers. In the former, the
supernumeraries of agriculture are transformed into factory
operatives; in the latter, those forced into the towns, whilst at
the same time they press on the wages in towns, remain
agricultural labourers, and are constantly sent back to the
country districts in search of work.
    The official inspectors sum up the material condition of the
agricultural labourer as follows: "Though living with the
strictest frugality, his own wages are barely sufficient to
provide food for an ordinary family and pay his rent, and he
depends upon other sources for the means of clothing himself, his
wife, and children... The atmosphere of these cabins, combined
with the other privations they are subjected to, has made this
class particularly susceptible to low fever and pulmonary
consumption."(135*) After this, it is no wonder that, according
to the unanimous testimony of the inspectors, a sombre discontent
runs through the ranks of this class, that they long for the
return of the past, loathe the present, despair of the future,
give themselves up "to the evil influence of agitators," and have
only one fixed idea, to emigrate to America. This is the land of
Cockaigne, into which the great Malthusian panacea, depopulation,
has transformed green Erin.
    What a happy life the Irish factory operative leads, one
example will show: "On my recent visit to the North of Ireland,"
says the English Factory Inspector, Robert Baker, "I met with the
following evidence of effort in an Irish skilled workman to
afford education to his children; and I give his evidence
verbatim, as I took it from his mouth. That he was a skilled
factory hand, may be understood when I say that he was employed
on goods for the Manchester market. 'Johnson. -- I am a beetler
and work from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, from Monday to
Friday. Saturday we leave off at 6 p.m., and get three hours of
it (for meals and rest). I have five children in all. For this
work I get 10s 6d a week; my wife works here also, and gets 5s a
week. The oldest girl who is 12, minds the house. She is also
cook, and all the servant we have. She gets the young ones ready
for school. A girl going past the house wakes me at half past
five in the morning. My wife gets up and goes along with me. We
get nothing (to eat) before we come to work. The child of 12
takes care of the little children all the day, and we get nothing
till breakfast at eight. At eight we go home. We get tea once a
week; at other times we get stirabout, sometimes of oat-meal,
sometimes of Indian meal, as we are able to get it. In the winter
we get a little sugar and water to our Indian meal. In the summer
we get a few potatoes, planting a small patch ourselves; and when
they are done we get back to stirabout. Sometimes we get a little
milk as it may be. So we go on from day to day, Sunday and week
day, always the same the year round. I am always very much tired
when I have done at night. We may see a bit of flesh meat
sometimes, but very seldom. Three of our children attend school,
for whom we pay 1d a week a head. Our rent is 9d a week. Peat for
firing costs 1s 6d a fortnight at the very lowest."'(136*) Such
are Irish wages, such is Irish life!
    In fact the misery of Ireland is again the topic of the day
in England. At the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, one of
the Irish land magnates, Lord Dufferin, set about its solution in
The Times. "Wie menschlich von solch grossem Herrn!"
    From Table E we saw that, during 1864, of £4,368,610 of total
profits, three surplus-value makers pocketed only £262,610; that
in 1865, however, out of £4,669,979 total profits, the same three
virtuosi of "abstinence" pocketed £274,448; in 1864, 26
surplus-value makers reached to £646,377; in 1865, 28
surplus-value makers reached to £736,448; in 1864, 121
surplus-value makers, £1,066,912; in 1865, 186 surplus-value
makers, £1,320,996; in 1864, 1,131 surplus-value makers
£2,150,818, nearly half of the total annual profit; in 1865,
1,194 surplus-value makers, £2,418,933, more than half of the
total annual profit. But the lion's share, which an inconceivably
small number of land magnates in England, Scotland and Ireland
swallow up of the yearly national rental, is so monstrous that
the wisdom of the English State does not think fit to afford the
same statistical materials about the distribution of rents as
about the distribution of profits. Lord Dufferin is one of those
land magnates. That rent-rolls and profits can ever be
"excessive," or that their plethora is in any way connected with
plethora of the people's misery is, of course, an idea as
"disreputable" as "unsound." He keeps to facts. The fact is that,
as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish rent-rolls swell;
that depopulation benefits the landlords, therefore also benefits
the soil, and, therefore, the people, that mere accessory of the
soil. He declares, therefore, that Ireland is still
over-populated, and the stream of emigration still flows too
lazily. To be perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least
one-third of a million of labouring men. Let no man imagine that
this lord, poetic into the bargain, is a physician of the school
of Sangrado, who as often as he did not find his patient better,
ordered phlebotomy and again phlebotomy, until the patient lost
his sickness at the same time as his blood. Lord Dufferin demands
a new blood-letting of one-third of a million only instead of
about two millions; in fact, without the getting rid of these,
the millennium in Erin is not to be. The proof is easily given.

Number and Extent of Farms in Ireland in 1864

(1) Farms Not Over 1 acre: No.: 48,653; Acres: 25,394.
(2) Farms over 1 acre, not over 5 acres: No.: 82,037; Acres:
288,916.
(3) Farms over 5, not over 15 acres: No.: 176,368; Acres:
1,836,310.
(4) Farms over 15, not over 30 acres: No.: 136,578; Acres:
3,051,343.
(5) Farms over 30, not over 50 acres: No.: 71,961; Acres:
2,906,274.
(6) Farms over 50, not over 100 acres: No.: 54,247; Acres:
3,983,880.
(7) Farms over 100 acres: No.: 31,927; Acres: 8,227,807.
(8) Total area: 26,319,924 acres.(137*)

    Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally
farms of the first three categories, under 1 and not over 15
acres. These above all must disappear. This gives 307,058
"supernumerary" farmers, and reckoning the families the low
average of 4 persons, 1,228,232 persons. On the extravagant
supposition that, after the agricultural revolution is complete
one-fourth of these are again absorbable, there remain for
emigration 921,174 persons. Categories 4, 5, 6, of over 15 and
not over 100 acres, are, as was known long since in England, too
small for capitalistic cultivation of corn, and for
sheep-breeding are almost vanishing quantities. On the same
supposition as before, therefore, there are further 788,761
persons to emigrate; total, 1,709,532. And as l'appetit vient en
mangeant, Rentroll's eyes will soon discover that Ireland, with 3
1/2 millions, is still always miserable, and miserable because
she is over-populated. Therefore her depopulation must go yet
further, that thus she may fulfil her true destiny, that of an
English sheep-walk and cattle-pasture.(138*)
    Like all good things in this bad world, this profitable
method has its drawbacks. With the accumulation of rents in
Ireland, the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace. The
Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side
of the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen of
the seas rises, threatening and more threatening, the young giant
Republic:

            Acerba fata Romanos agunt
            Scelusque fraternae necis.

NOTES:

1. Karl Marx, l.c., "A egalite d'oppression des masses, plus un
pays a de proletaires et plus il est riche." (Colins, "L'Economie
Politique. Source des Revolutions et des Utopies pretendues
Socialistes." Paris, 1857, t. III, p. 331) Our "proletarian" is
economically none other than the wage-labourer who produces and
increases capital, and is thrown out on the streets, as soon as
he is superfluous for the needs of aggrandisement of "Monsieur
capital," as Pecqueur calls this person. "The sickly proletarian
of the primitive forest," is a pretty Roscherian fancy. The
primitive forester is owner of the primitive forest, and uses the
primitive forest as his property with the freedom of an
orang-outang. He is not, therefore, a proletarian. This would
only be the case, if the primitive forest exploited him, instead
of being exploited by him. As far as his health is concerned,
such a man would well bear comparison, not-only with the modern
proletarian, but also with the syphilitic and scrofulous upper
classes. But, no doubt, Herr Wilhelm Roscher by "primitive
forest" means his native heath of Lüneburg: 

2. John Bellers, l.c., p. 2.

3. Bernard de Mandeville: "The Fable of the Bees," 5th edition,
London, 1728. Bemarks, pp. 212, 213, 328. "Temperate living and
constant employment is the direct road, for the poor, to rational
happiness" [by which he most probably means long working-days and
little means of subsistence]. "and to rich and strength the
state" (viz., for the landlords, capitalists, and their political
dignitaries and agents). ("An Essay on Trade and Commerce,"
London, 1770, p. 54)

4. Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are "the civil
institutions"? From his standpoint of juridical illusion, he does
not regard the law as a product of the material relations of
production, but conversely the relations of production as
products of the law. Linguet overthrew Montesquieu's illusory
"Esprit des lois" with one word: "L'esprit des lois, c'est la
propriete."

5. Eden, l.c., Vol. I, book 1, chapter 1, pp. 1, 2, and preface,
p. xx.

6. If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose "Essay on
Population" appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its
first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial
plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, 'Townsend, Franklin,
Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single sentence thought out
by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due
solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found
passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the "principle of
population," slowly worked out in the eighteenth century, and
then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with
drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of
Condorcet, etc., was greeted with jubilance by the English
oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human
development. Malthus, hugely astonished at his success, gave
himself to stuffing into his book materials superficially
compiled, and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed
by him. Note further: Although Malthus was a parson of the
English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy
one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant
Cambridge University: "Socios collegiorum maritos esse non
permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit, socius
collegii desinat esse." ("Reports of Cambridge University
Commission," p. 172) This circumstance favourably distinguishes
Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off
the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken,
"Be fruitful and multiply " as their special Biblical mission in
such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of
population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at
the same time to the labourers the "principle of population." It
is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam's
apple, the urgent appetite, "the checks which tend to blunt the
shafts of Cupid," as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this
delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of
Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the
exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever
writer, most of the population-theory teachers are Protestant
parsons. For instance, Bruckner, "Theorie du Système animal,"
Leyde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern population
theory is exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between
Quesnay and his pupil, the elder Mirabeau, furnished ideas on the
same topic; then Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus
and his pupil, the arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of
lesser reverend scribblers in this line. Originally, Political
Economy was studied by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume; by
businessmen and statesmen, like Thomas More, Temple, Sully, De
Witt, North, Law, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Franklin; and
especially, and with the greatest success, by medical men like
Petty, Barbon, Mandeville, Quesnay. Even in the middle of the
eighteenth century, the Rev Mr Tucker, a notable economist of his
time, excused himself for meddling with the things of Mammon.
Later on, and in truth with this very "principle of population,"
struck the hour of the Protestant parsons. Petty, who regarded
the population as the basis of wealth, and was, like Adam Smith,
an outspoken foe to parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of
their bungling interference, "that Religion best flourishes when
the Priests are most mortified, as was before said of the Law,
which hest flourisheth when lawyers have least to do." He advises
the Protestant priests, therefore, if they once for all, will not
follow the Apostle Paul and "mortify" themselves by celibacy,
"not to breed more Churchmen than the Benefices, as they now
stand shared out, will receive, that is to say, if there be
places for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will
not he safe to breed up 24,000 ministers, for then the twelve
thousand which are unprovided for, will see ways how to get
themselves a livelihood, which they cannot do more easily than by
persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do
poison or starve their souls, and misguide them in their way to
Heaven." (Petty; "A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions," London,
1667 p 57) Adam Smith's position with the Protestant priesthood
of is time is show by the following. In "A Letter to A. Smith,
L.L.D. On the Life, Death, and Philosophy of his Friend, David
Hume. By one of the People called Christians," 4th Edition,
Oxford, 1784. Dr Horne, Bishop of Norwich, reproves Adam Smith,
because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan, he "embalmed his
friend David" (sc. Hume); because he told the world how "Hume
amused himself on his deathbed with Lucian and Whist," and
because he even had the impudence to write of Hume: "I have
always considered him both in his life time and since his death,
as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and
virtuous man, as, perhaps, the nature of human frailty will
permit." The bishop cries out, in a passion: "Is it right in you.
Sir to hold to our view as 'perfectly wise and virtuous.' the
character and conduct one, who seems to have been possessed with
an incurable antipathy to all that is called Religion; and who
strained every nerve to explode, suppress and extirpate the
spirit of it among men, that its very name, if he could effect
it, might no more be had in remembrance?" (l.c., p.8) "But let
not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long
continuance." (p. 17) Adam Smith, "had the atrocious wickedness
to propagate atheism through the land (viz., by his "Theory of
Moral Sentiments"). Upon the whole, Doctor, your meaning is good;
but I think you will not succeed this time. You would persuade
us, by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only
cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear
of death... You may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate
the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Bed Sea." (l.c., pp.
21, 22) One orthodox individual, amongst Adam Smith's college
friends, writes after his death: "Smith's well placed affection
for Hume hindered him from being a Christian... When he met with
honest men whom he liked... he would believe almost anything they
said. Had he been a friend of the worthy ingenious Horrox he
would have believed that the moon sometimes disappeared in a
clear sky without the interposition of a cloud... He approached
to republicanism in his political principles." ("The Bee." By
James Anderson, 18 Vols., Vol. 3, pp 166, 165, Edinburgh,
1791-93) Parson Thomas Chalmers has his suspicious as to Adam
Smith having invented the category of "unproductive labourers,"
solely for the Protestant parsons, in spite of their blessed work
in the vineyard of the Lord.

7. "The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative
and the labourer is the same; namely, the possibility of the
employer realising a profit on the produce of their industry. If
the rate of wages is such as to reduce the master's gains below
the average profit of capital, he will cease to employ them. or
he will only employ them on condition of submission to a
reduction of wages." (John Wade, l.c., p. 241)

8. Cf. Karl Marx: "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie," pp.
166, seq.

9. "If we now return to our first inquiry, wherein it was shown
that capital itself is only the result of human labour it seems
quite incomprehensible that man can have fallen under the
domination capital, his own product; can be subordinated to it;
and as in reality this is beyond dispute the case, involuntarily
the question arises: How has the labourer been able to pass from
being master of capital -- as its creator -- to being its slave?"
(Von Thünen. "Der isolierte Staat" Part ii, Section ii, Rostock,
1863, pp. 5, 6) It is Thünen's merit to have asked this question.
His answer is simply childish.

* Here (from "which in its first stages" to p. 628
"centralisation movement") the English text has been altered in
conformity with the 4th German edition. -- Ed.

10. [Note in the 4th German edition. -- The latest English and
American "trusts" are already striving to attain this goal by
attempting to unite at least all the large-scale cOncerns in one
branch of industry into one great joint-stock company with a
practical monopoly. -- F.E.]

11. Note in the 3rd German edition. -- In Marx's copy there is
here the marginal note: "Here note for working out later; if the
extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and a smaller
capital in the same branch of business the profits are as the
magnitudes of the capitals advanced. If the quantitative
extension induces qualitative change, then the rate of profit on
the larger capital rises simultaneously." -- F.E.

12. The census of England and Wales shows: all persons employed
in agriculture (landlords, farmers, gardeners, shepherds, etc.,
included): 1851, 2,011,447: 1861, 1,924,110. Fall, 87,337.
Worsted manufacture: 1851, 102,714 persons: 1861, 79,242. Silk
weaving: 1851, 111,940: 1861, 101,678. Calico-printing: 1851,
12,098: 1861, 12,556. A small rise that, in the face of the
enormous extension of this industry and implying a great fall
proportionally in the number of labourers employed. Hat-making:
1851, 15,957: 1861, 13,814. Straw-hat and bonnet-making: 1851,
20,393: 1861, 18,176. Malting: 1851, 10,566: 1861, 10,677.
Chandlery, 1851, 4,949: 1861, 4,686. This fall is due, besides
other causes, to the increase in lighting by gas. Comb-making:
1851, 2,038: 1861, 1,478. Sawyers: 1851, 30,552: a small rise in
consequence of the increase of sawing-machines. Nail-making:
1851, 26,940: 1861, 26,130 -- fall in consequence of the
competition of machinery. Tin and copper-mining: 1851, 31,360:
1861, 32,041. On the other hand: Cotton spinning and weaving:
1851, 371,777: 1861, 456,646. Coalmining: 1851, 183,389: 1861,
246,613. "The increase of labourers is generally greatest, since
1851, in such branches of industry in which machinery has not up
to the present been employed with success." (Census of England
and Wales for 1861. Vol. III. London, 1863, p. 36.)

13. [Added in the 4th German edition. -- The law of progressive
diminution of the relative magnitude of variable capital and its
effect on the condition of the class of wage-workers is
conjectured rather than understood by some of the prominent
economists of the classical school. The greatest service was
rendered here by John Barton, although he, like all the rest,
lumps together constant and fixed capital, variable and
circulating capital. He says:] "The demand for labour depends on
the increase of circulating, capital. Were it true that the
proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at all
times, and in all circumstances, then, indeed, it follows that
the number of labourers employed is in proportion to the wealth
of the state. But such a proposition has not the semblance of
probability. As arts are cultivated, and civilisation is
extended, fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to
circulating capital. The amount of fixed capital employed in the
production of a piece of British muslin is at least a hundred,
probably a thousand times greater than that employed in a similar
piece of Indian muslin. And the proportion of circulating capital
is a hundred or thousand times less... the whole of the annual
savings, added to the fixed capital, would have no effect in
increasing the demand for labour." (John Barton, "Observations on
the Circumstances which Influence the Condition of the Labouring
Classes of Society." London, 1817, pp. 16, 17) "The same cause
which may increase the net revenue of the country may at the same
time render the population redundant, and deteriorate the
condition of the labourer " (Ricardo, l.c., p. 469) With increase
of capital, "the demand [for labour] will be in a diminishing
ratio." (ibid. p. 480, Note) "The amount of capital devoted to
the maintenance of labour may vary, independently of any changes
in the whole amount of capital... Great fluctuations in the
amount of employment, and great suffering may become more
frequent as capital itself becomes more plentiful." (Richard
Jones, "An Introductory Lecture on Pol. Econ.," Lond. 1833, p.
13) "Demand [for labour] will rise... not in proportion to the
accumulation of the general capital... Every augmentation,
therefore, in the national stock destined for reproduction,
comes, in the progress of society, to have less and less
influence upon the condition of the labourer." (Ramsay, l.c., pp.
90, 91)

14. H. Merivale: "Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies," 1841.
Vol. I, p. 146.

15. Malthus, "Principles of Political Economy", 215, 319, 320. In
this work, Malthus finally discovers, with the help of Sismondi,
the beautiful Trinity of capitalistic production:
over-production, over-population, over-consumption -- three very
delicate monsters, indeed. Cf. F. Engels, "Umrisse zu einer
Kritik der Nationalökonomie," l.c., p. 107 et seq.

16. Harriet Martineau, "A Manchester Strike," 1832, p. 101. 

17. Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a pamphlet of
the operative cotton-spinners of Blackburn, fierce denunciations
of over-work, which, in consequence of the Factory Acts, of
course only affected adult male labourers. "The adult operatives
at this mill have been asked to work from 12 to 13 hours per day
while there are hundreds who are compelled to be idle who would
willingly work partial time, in order to maintain their families
and save their brethren from a premature grave through being
overworked... We," it goes on to say, "would ask if the practice
working overtime by a number of hands, is likely to create a good
feeling between masters and servants. Those who are worked
over-time feel the injustice equally with those who are condemned
to forced idleness. There is in the district almost sufficient
work to give to all partial employment if fairly distributed. We
are only asking what is right in requesting the masters generally
to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better
state of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a
portion of the hands over-time, while others, for want of work,
are compelled to exist upon charity." ("Reports of Insp, of
Fact., Oct. 31, 1863," p. 8) The author of the "Essay on Trade
and Commerce" grasps the effect of a relative surplus-population
on the employed labourers with his usual unerring bourgeois
instinct. "Another cause of idleness in this kingdom is the want
of a sufficient number of labouring hands... Whenever from an
extraordinary demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the
labourers feel their own consequence, and will make their masters
feel it likewise-it is amazing; but so depraved are the
dispositions of these people, t.hat in such cases a set of
workmen have combined to distress the employer by idling a whole
day together." ("Essay, etc.," pp. 27, 28.) The fellows in fact
were hankering after a rise in wages.

18. Economist, Jan. 21, 1860.

19. Whilst during the last six months of 1866, 80-90,000 working
people in London were thrown out of work, the Factory Report for
that same half year says: "It does not appear absolutely true to
say that demand will always produce supply just at the moment
when it is needed. It has not done so with labour for much
machinery has been idle last year for want of hands." ("Rep. of
Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866," p. 81.)

20. Opening address to the Sanitary Conference, Birmingham,
January 15th, 1875, by J. Chamberlain, Mayor of the town, now
(1883) President of the Board of Trade.

21. 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England and Wales
"contained 10,960,998 inhabitants, while the villages and country
parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851, 580 towns were
distinguished, and the population in them and in the surrounding
country was nearly equal. But while in the subsequent ten years
the population in the villages and the country increased half a
million, the population in the 580 towns increased by a million
and a half (1,554,067). The increase of the population of the
country parishes is 6.5 per cent, and of the towns 17.3 per cent.
The difference in the rates of increase is due to the migration
from country to town. Three-fourths of the total increase of
population has taken place in the towns." ("Census, etc.," pp. 11
and 12.)

22. "Poverty seems favourable to generation." (A. Smith) This is
even a specially wise arrangement of God, according to the
gallant and witty Abbe Galiani. "Iddio af che gli uomini che
esercitano mestieri di prima utilita nascono abbondantemente."
(Galiani, l.c., p. 78.) "Misery up to the extreme point of famine
and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to increase
population." (S. Laing, "National Distress, 1844, p. 69) After
Laing has illustrated this by statistics. he continues: "If the
people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be
depopulated."

23. "De jour en jour il devient donc plus clair que les rapports
de production dans lesquels se meut la bourgeoisie n'ont pas un
caractère un, un caractère simple, mais un caractère de
duplicite; que dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels se produit
la richesse, la misère se produit aussi; que dans les mêmes
rapports dans lesquels il y a developpement des forces
productives, il y a une force productive de repression; que ces
rapports ne produisent la richesse bourgeoise, c'est-a -dire la
richesse de la classe bourgeoise, qu'en aneantissant continuel
lement la richesse des membres integrants de cette classe et en
produisant un proletariat toujours croissant." (Karl Marx:
"Misère de la Philosophie." p. 116.)

24. G. Ortes: "Della Economia Nazionale libri sei, 1777" in
Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xxi, pp 6, 9, 22. 25. etc. Ortes says,
l.c., p. 32: "In luoco di progettar sistemi inutili per la
felicita de'popoli, mi limiterò a investigare la ragione della
loro infelicita."

25. "A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-wisher of
Mankind. (The Rev J. Townsend) 1786," republished Lond. 1817, pp.
15, 39, 41. This "delicate" parson, from whose work just quoted ,
as well as from his "Journey through Spain," Malthus often copies
whole pages, himself borrowed the greater part of his doctrine
from Sir James Steuart, whom he however alters in the borrowing.
E.g., when Steuart says: "Here, in slavery, was a forcible method
of making mankind diligent," [for the non-workers] "Men were then
forced to work" [i.e., to work gratis for others], "because they
were slaves of others; men are now forced to work" [i.e., to work
gratis for non-workers] "because they are the slaves of their
necessities," he does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of
benefices, that the wage-labourer must always go fasting. He
wishes, on the contrary to increase their wants and to make the
increasing number of their wants a stimulus to their labour for
the "more delicate."

26. Storch, l.c., t. iii., p. 223.

27. Sismondi, l.c., pp. 79, 80, 85.

28. Destutt de Tracy, l.c., p. 231: "Les nations pauvres, c'est
la où le peuple est a son aise; et les nations riches, c'est la
où il est ordinairement pauvre."

29. "Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H. M. Inland Revenue."
Lond. 1866, p. 38.

30. Ibidem.

31. These figures are sufficient for comparison, but, taken
absolutely are false, since perhaps, £100,000,000 of income are
annually not declared. The complaints of the Inland Revenue
Commissioners of systematic fraud, especially on the part of the
commercial and industrial classes, are repeated in each of their
reports. So e.g., "A Joint-stock company returns £6,000 as
assessable profits, the surveyor raises the amount to £88,000,
and upon that sum duty is ultimately paid. Another company which
returns £190,000 is finally compelled to admit that the true
return should be £250,000." (Ibid., p 42)

32. "Census, etc.," l.c., p. 29. John Bright's assertion that 150
landlords own half of England, and 12 half the Scotch soil, has
never been refuted.

33. "Fourth Report, etc., of Inland Revenue." Lond., 1860, p. 17

34. These are the net incomes after certain legally authorised
abatements.

35. At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese market is
again overstocked by the consignments of the British cotton
manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent took
place amongst the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of a
similar operation, there was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston.
[Added in the 4th German edition. -- That was the prelude to the
crisis which broke out immediately afterwards. -- F.E.]

36. "Census, etc.," l.c., p. 11.

37. Gladstone in the House of Commons, Feb 13th, 1843. Times,
Feb. 14th, 1843 -- "It is one of the most melancholy features in
the social state of this country that we see, beyond the
possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a
decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of
the pressure of privations and distress; there is at the same
time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an
increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means
of enjoyment." (Hansard, 13th Feb.)

38. Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 16th, 1863. Morning
Star, April 17th.

39. See the official accounts in the Blue book: "Miscellaneous
Statistics of the United Kingdom," Part vi., London, 1866, pp.
260-273, passim. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums,
etc., the declamations of the ministerial journals in
recommending dowries for the Royal children might also serve. The
greater dearness the means of subsistence is never forgotten
there.

40. Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864. -- "The Hansard
version runs: 'Again, and yet more at large-what is human life,
but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for existence.' The
continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches of
1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the
following quotation from Boileau:

        "Voila l'homme en effet. Il va du blanc au noir,
        Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.
        Importun a tout autre, a soi-même incommode,
        Il change a tout moment d'esprit comme de mode."
("The Theory of Exchanges, etc.," London, 1864, p. 135.)

41. H. Fawcett, l.c., pp. 67-82. As to the increasing dependence
of labourers on the retail shopkeepers, this is the consequence
of the frequent oscillations and interruptions of their
employment.

42. Wales here is always included in England.

43. A peculiar light is thrown on the advance made since the time
of Adam Smith, by the fact that by him the word "workhouse" is
still occasionally used as synonymous with "manufactory": e g.,
the opening of his chapter on the division of labour: "those
employed in every different branch of the work can often be
collected into the same workhouse."

44. "Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864," p. 13.

45. l.c., p. 17

46. l.c., p. 13.

47. l.c., Appendix, p. 232.

48. l.c., pp. 232, 233.

49. l.c., pp. 14, 15.

50. "In no particular have the rights of persons been so avowedly
and shamefully sacrificed to the rights of property as in regard
to the lodging of the labouring class. Every large town may be
looked upon as a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where
thousands pass yearly through the fire as offerings to the moloch
of avarice." S. Laing, l.c., p. 150.

51. "Public Health, eighth report, 1866," p. 14, note.

52. l.c., p. 89. With reference to the children in these
colonies, Dr Bunter says: "People are not now alive to tell us
how children were brought up before this age of dense
agglomerations of poor began, and he would be a rash prophet who
should tell us what future behaviour is to be expected from the
present growth of children, who, under circumstances probably
never before paralleled in this country, are now completing their
education for future practice, as 'dangerous classes' by sitting
up half the night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken,
obscene, and quarrelsome," (l.c., p. 56)

53. l, c , p . 62. 

54. "Report of the Officer of Health of St.
Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865,"

55. Public Health, eighth report, 1866, p. 91.

56. l.c., p. 88.

57. l.c., p. 88.

58. l.c., p. 89.

59. l.c., p. 55 and 56.

60. l.c., p. 149.

61. l.c., p. 50.

62. COLLECTING AGENTS LIST (BRADFORD)

                              Houses
Vulcan Street, No. 122....      1 room 16 persons
Lumrey Street, No. 13....       1   "  11    "
Bower Street, No. 41.....       1   "  11    "
Portland Street, No. 112..      1   "  10    "
Hardy Street, No. 17.....       1   "  10    "
North Street, No. 18.....       1   "  16    "
North Street, No. 17....        1   "  13    "
Wymer Street, No. 19.....       1   "   8 adults
Jowett Street, No. 56....       1   "  12 persons
George Street, No. 150...       1   "   3 families
Rifle Court Marygate, No..11..  1   "  11 persons
Marshall Street, No. 28....     1   "  10   "
Marshall Street, No. 49....     3   "   3 families
George Street. No. 128....      1   "  18 persons
George Street, No. 130....      1   "   16   "
Edward Street, No. 4.....       1   "   17   "
George Street, No. 49....       1   "    2 families
York Street, No. 34....         1   "    2    "
Salt Pie Street (bottom)....    2   "   26 persons

                            Cellars
Regent Square.......        1 cellar 8 persons
Acre Street.........        1   "    7   "
33 Roberts Court.....       1   "    7   "
Back Pratt Street, used as a
    brazer's shop.....      1   "    7   "
27 Ebenezer Street....      1   "    6   " (no male above 18)
        l. c., p. 11.

63. l.c., p. 114.

64. l.c., p. 50

65. "Public Health. Seventh Report. 1865." p 18.

66. l.c., p. 165.

67. l.c., p. 18, Note. -- The Relieving Officer of the
Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registrar-General as
follows: -- "At Doveholes, a number of small excavations have
been made into a large hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of
lime-kilns), and which are used as dwellings. and occupied by
labourers and others employed in the construction of a railway
now in course of construction through that neighbourhood. The
excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies
about them, and not the slightest means of ventilation except up
a hole pulled through the top, and used for a chimney In
consequence of this defect, small-pox has been been raging for
some time, and some deaths [amongst the troglodytes] have by it."
(l.c., note 2)

68. The details given at the end of Part IV refer especially to
the labourers in coal mines. On the still worse condition in
metal mines, see the very conscientious Report of the Royal
Commission of 1864.

69. l.c., pp. 180, 182.

70. l.c., pp. 515, 517.

71. l.c., p. 16.

72. "Wholesale starvation of the London Poor. Within the last few
days the walls of London have been placarded with large posters,
bearing the following remarkable announcement: -- 'Fat oxen!
Starving men! The fat oxen from their palace of glass have gone
to feed the rich in their luxurious abode, while the starving men
are left to rot and die in their wretched dens. 'The placards
bearing these ominous words are put up at certain intervals. No
sooner has one set been defaced or covered over, than a fresh set
is placarded in the former, or some equally public place...
this... reminds one of the secret revolutionary associations
which prepared the French people for the events of 1789... At
this moment, while English workmen with their wives and children
are dying of cold and hunger, there are millions of English gold
-- the produce of English labour -- being invested in in Russian,
Spanish, Italian, and other foreign enterprises." -- Reynolds'
Newspaper, January 20th, 1867.

73. James E. Thorold Rogers. (Prof. of Polit. Econ. in the
University of Oxford) "A History of Agriculture and Prices in
England." Oxford, 1866, v. 1, p. 690. This work, the fruit of
patient and diligent labour, contains in the two volumes that
have so far appeared, only the period from 1259 to 1400. The
second volume contains simply statistics. It is the first
authentic "History of Prices" of the time that we possess.

74. "Reasons for the Late Increase of the Poor-Rates: or a
comparative view of the prices of labour and provisions." Lond.,
1777, pp. 5, 11.

75. Dr Richard Price: "Observations on Reversionary Payments,"
6th Ed. By W. Morgan, Lond., 1803, v. II, pp. 158, 159. Price
remarks on p. 159: "The nominal price of day-labour is at present
no more than about four times, or, at most, five times higher
than it was in the year 1514. But the price of corn is seven
times, and of flesh-meat and raiment about fifteen times higher.
So far, therefore, has the price of labour been even from
advancing in proportion to the increase in the expenses of
living, that it does not appear that it bears now half the
proportion to those expenses that it did bear."

76. Barton, l.c., p. 26. For the end of the 18th century cf.
Eden, l.c.

77. Parry. l.c., p. 86

78. id., p. 213

79. S. Laing, l.c. p 62

80. "England and America." Lond., 1833, Vol 1., p 47.

81. London Economist, March 29th, 1845, p. 290.

82. The landed aristocracy advanced themselves to this end, of
course per Parliament, funds from the State Treasury, at a very
low rate of interest, which the farmers have to make good at a
much higher rate.

83. The decrease of the middle-class farmers can be seen
especially in the census category: "Farmer's son, grandson,
brother, nephew, daughter, grand-daughter, sister, niece"; in a
word, the members of his own family, employed by the farmer. This
category numbered, in 1851, 216,851 persons; in 1861, only
176,151. From 1851 to 1871, the farms under 20 acres fell by more
than 900 in number; those between 50 and 75 acres fell from 8,253
to 6,370; the same thing occurred with all other farms under 100
acres. On the other hand, during the same twenty years, the
number of large farms increased; those of 300-500 acres rose from
7,771 to 8,410, those of more than 500 acres from 2,755 to 3,914,
those of more than 1,000 acres from 492 to 582.

84. The number of shepherds increased from 12,517 to 25,559.

85. Census l.c., p. 36.

86. Rogers, l.c., p. 693, p. 10. Mr Rogers belongs to the Liberal
School, is a personal friend of Cobden and Bright, and therefore
no laudator temporis acti

87. "Public Health, Seventh Report," 1865, p. 242. It is
therefore nothing unusual either for the landlord to raise a
labourer's rent as soon as he hears that he is earning a little
more, or for the farmer to lower the wage of the labourer
"because his wife has found a trade," l.c.

88. l.c., p. 135.

89. l.c., p. 134.

90. "Report of the Commissioners... relating to Transportation
and Penal 5ervitude," Lond., 1863, pp. 42, 50.

91. l.c., p. 77 "Memorandum by the Lord Chief Justice."

92. l.c., Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence. 

93. l.c. , Vol. I. Appendix, p. 280. 5 1. c., pp. 274, 275. 

94. "Public Health, Sixth Report." 1864, pp. 238, 249, 261 . 262.

95. l.c., p. 262.

96. l.c., p. 17. The English agricultural labour.er receives only
1/4 as much milk, and 1/2 as much bread as the Irish. Arthur
Young in his "Tour in Ireland," at the beginning of this century
already noticed the better nourishment of the latter The reason
is simply this, that the poor Irish farmer is incomparably more
humane than the rich English. As regards Wales, that which is
said in the text holds only for the south-west. All the doctors
there agree that the increase of the death-rate through
tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the
deterioration the physical condition of the population, and all
ascribe this deterioration to poverty. "His (the farm labourer's)
keep is reckoned at about five pence a day, but in many districts
it was said to be of much less cost to the farmer" [himself very
poor]...."A morsel of the salt meat or bacon, salted and dried to
the texture of mahogany and hardly worth the difficult process of
assimilation... is used to flavour a large quantity of broth or
gruel, of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the
labourer's dinner." The advance of industry resulted for him, in
this harsh and damp climate, in "the abandonment of the solid
homespun clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton
goods," and of stronger drinks for so-called tea. "The
agriculturist, after several hours' exposure to wind and rain,
gains his cottage to sit by a fire of peat or of balls of clay
and small coal kneaded together, from which volumes of carbonic
and sulphurous acids are poured forth. His walls are of mud and
stones, his floor the bare earth which was there before the hut
was built, his roof a mass of loose and sodden thatch. Every
crevice is topped to maintain warmth, and in an atmosphere of
diabolic odour, with a mud floor, with his only clothes drying on
his back, he often sups and sleeps with his wife and children.
Obstetricians who have passed parts of the night in such cabins
have described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of
the floor, and they were forced (easy task) to drill a hole
through the wall to effect a little private respiration. It was
attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of life, that to
these insanitary influences, and many more, the underfed peasant
was nightly exposed, and of the result, a debilitated and
scrofulous people, there was no want of evidence The statements
of the relieving officers of Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire
show in a striking way the same state of things. There is besides
"a plague more horrible still, the great number of idiots." Now a
word on the climatic conditions. "A strong south-west wind blows
over the whole country for 8 or 9 months in the year bringing
with it torrents of rain, which discharge principally upon the
western slopes of the hills. Trees are rare, except in sheltered
places, and where not protected, are blown out of all shape. The
cottages generally crouch under some bank, or often in a ravine
or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and native cattle can
live on the pastures... The young people migrate to the eastern
mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth. Carmarthenshire is
the breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital.
The population can therefore barely maintain its numbers." Thus
in Cardiganshire:
                        1851      1861
Males......             45,155    44,446
Females....             52,459    52,955
                        97,614    97,401

Dr. Hunter's Report in "Public Health, Seventh Report. 1865.," pp
498-502, passim. 

97. In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It will soon be
learnt from experience that tinkering of this sort is of no use.

98. In order to understand that which follows, we must remember
that "Close Villages" are those whose owners are one or two large
landlords. "Open villages," those whose soil belongs to many
smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators
can build cottages and lodging-houses.

99. A show-village of this kind looks very nice, but is as unreal
as the villages that Catherine II. saw on her journey to the
Crimea. In recent times the shepherd also has often been banished
from these show-villages; e.g., near Market Harboro 'is a
sheep-farm of about 500 acres, which only employs the labour of
one man. To reduce the long trudges over these wide plains, the
beautiful pastures of Leicester and Northampton, the shepherd
used to get a cottage on the farm. Now they give him a thirteenth
shilling a week for lodging, that he must find far away in an
open village.

100. "The labourers' houses (in the open villages, which, of
course, are always over-crowded) are usually in rows, built with
their backs against the extreme edge of the plot of land which
the builder could call his, and on this account are not allowed
light and air except from the front." (Dr Hunter's Report, l.c.,
p. 135) Very often the beerseller or grocer of the village is at
the same time the letter of its houses. In this case the
agricultural labourer finds in him a second master, besides the
farmer. He must be his customer as well as his tenant. "The hind
with his 10s a week, minus a rent of £4 a year... is obliged to
buy at the seller's own terms, his modicum of tea, sugar, flour,
soap, candles, and beer." (l.c., p. 132) These open villages
form, in fact, the "penal settlements" of the English
agricultural proletariat. Many of the cottages are simply lodging
houses, through which all the rabble of the neighbourhood passes.
The country labourer and his family who had often, in a way truly
wonderful, preserved, under the foulest conditions, a
thoroughness and purity of character, go, in these, utterly to
the devil. It is, of course, the fashion amongst the aristocratic
shylocks to shrug their shoulders pharisaically at the building
speculators, the small landlords, and the open villages. They
know well enough that their "close villages" and "show-villages"
are the birthplaces of the open villages, and could not exist
without them. "The labourers... were it not for the small owners,
would, for by far the most part, have to sleep under the trees of
the farms on which they work." (l.c., p. 135) The system of
"open" and "closed" villages obtains in all the Midland counties
and throughout the East of England.

101. "The employer... is... directly or indirectly securing to
himself the profit on a man employed at 10s a week, and receiving
from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent for houses not worth £20
in a really free market, but maintained at their artificial value
by the power of the owner to say 'Use my house, or go seek a
hiring elsewhere, without a character from me.' Does a man wish
to better himself, to go as a plate-layer on the railway, or to
begin quarry-work, the same power is ready with 'Work for me at
this low rate of wages, or begone at a week's notice; take your
pig with you, and get what you can for the potatoes growing in
your garden.' Should his interest appear to be better served by
it, an enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases by the
owner (i.e., the farmer) as the penalty for leaving his service."
(Dr Hunter, l.c., p. 132)

102. "New married couples are no edifying study for grown-up
brothers and sisters: and though instances must not be recorded,
sufficient data are remembered to warrant the remark, that great
depression and sometimes death are the lot of the female
participator in the offence of incest." (Dr Hunter, l.c., p. 137)
A member of the rural police who had for many years been a
detective in the worst quarters London, says of the girls of his
village: "their boldness and shamelessness I never saw equalled
during some years of police life and detective duty in the worst
parts of London... They live like pigs, great boys and girls,
mothers and fathers, all sleeping in one room, in many
instances." ("Child. Empl. Com. Sixth Report, 1867" p. 77 sq.
155)

103. "Public Health. Seventh Report, 1865," pp. 9, 14 passim.

104. "The heaven-born employment of the hind gives dignity even
to his position. He is not a slave, but a soldier of peace, and
deserves his place in married men's quarters to be provided by
the landlord, who has claimed a power of enforced labour similar
to that the country demands of the soldier. He no more receives
market-price for his work than does the soldier. Like the soldier
he is caught young, ignorant, knowing only his own trade, and his
own locality Early marriage and the operation of the various laws
of settlement affect.the one as enlistment and the Mutiny Act
affect the other." (Dr Hunter l.c., p. 132) Sometimes an
exceptionally soft-hearted landlord relents at the solitude he
has created. "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's
country" said Lord Leicester, when complimented on the completion
of Hookham. "I look around and not a house is to be seen but
mine. I am the giant of Giant Castle, and have eat up all my
neighbours."

105. A similar movement is seen during the last ten years in
France; in proportion as capitalist production there takes
possession of agriculture, it drives the "surplus" agricultural
population into the towns. Here also we find deterioration in the
housing and other conditions at the source of the
surplus-population. On the special "proletariat foncier," to
which this system of parcelling out the land has given rise, see
among others, the work of Colins, already quoted, and Karl Marx
"Der Acht zehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte." 2nd edition.
Hamburg, 1869, pp. 56, etc. In 1846, the town population in
France was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58; in
1861, the town by 28.86, the agricultural by 71.14 per cent.
During the last 5 years, the diminution of the agricultural
percentage of the population has been yet more marked. As early
as 1846. Pierre Dupont in his "Ouvriers" sang: 
            Mal vêtus, loges dans des trous,
            Sous les combles, dans les decombres,
            Nous vivons avec les hiboux
            Et les larrons, amis des ombres. 

106. "Sixth and last Report of the Children's Employment
Commission," published at the end of March, 1867. It deals solely
with the agricultural gang-system.

107. "Child. Emp. Comm., VI. Report." Evidence 173, p. 37.

108. Some gang-masters, however, have worked themselves up to the
position of farmers of 500 acres, or proprietors of whole rows of
houses.

109. "Half the girls of Ludford have been ruined by going out"
(in gangs). l.c., p. 6, sec. 32.

110. "They (gangs) have greatly increased of late years. In some
places they are said to have been introduced at comparatively
late dates; in others where gangs have been known for many
years... more and younger children are employed in them." (l.c.,
p. 79, sec. 174).

111. "Small farmers never employ gangs." "It is not on poor land,
but on land which affords rent of from 40 to 50 shillings, that
women and children are employed in the greatest numbers." (l.c.,
pp. 17, 14)

112. To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent was so
grateful that he indignantly declared to the Commission of
Inquiry that the whole hubbub was only due to the name of the
system. If instead of "gang" it were called "The Agricultural
Juvenile Industrial Self-supporting Association," everything
would be all right

113. "Gang work is cheaper than other work; that is why they are
employed," says a former gang-master (l.c., p. 17, sec. 14) "The
gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and
decidedly the worst for the children," says a farmer. (l.c., p.
16, sec. 3)

114. "Undoubtedly much of the work now done by children in gangs
used to be done by men and women. More men are out of work now
where children and women are employed than formerly." (l.c., p.
43, n.202) On the other hand "the labour question in some
agricultural districts, particularly the arable, is becoming so
serious in consequence of emigration, and the facility afforded
by railways for getting to large towns that I (the "I" is the
steward of a great lord) think the services of children are most
indispensable." (l.c., p. 80, n. 180) For the "labour question"
in English agricultural districts, differently from the rest of
the civilised world, means the landlords' and farmers' question,
viz. , how it is possible, despite an always increasing exodus of
the agricultural folk, to keep up a sufficient relative
surplus-population in the country, and by means of it keep the
wages of the agricultural labourer at a minimum?

115. The "Public Health Report," where in dealing with the
subject of children's mortality, the gang system is treated in
passing, remains unknown to the press, and, therefore, to the
English public. On the other hand, the last report of the "Child.
Empl. Comm." afforded the press sensational copy always welcome.
Whilst the Liberal press asked how the fine gentlemen and ladies,
and the well-paid clergy of the State Church, with whom
Lincolnshire swarms, could allow such a system to arise on their
estates, under their very eyes, they who send out expressly
missions to the Antipodes, "for the improvement of the morals of
South Sea Islanders" -- the more refined press confined itself to
reflections on the coarse degradation off the agricultural
population who are capable of selling their children into such
slavery! Under the accursed conditions to which these "delicate"
people condemn the agricultural labourer, it would not be
surprising if he ate his own children. What is really wonderful
is the healthy integrity of character, he has, in great part,
retained. The official reports prove that the parents, even in
the gang districts, loathe the gang-system. "There is much in the
evidence that shows that the parents of the children would, in
many instances, be glad to be aided by the requirements of a
legal obligation, to resist the pressure and the temptations to
which they are often subject. They are liable to be urged, at
times by the parish officers, at times by employers, under
threats of being themselves discharged, to be taken to work at an
age when... school attendance... would be manifestly to their
greater advantage.... All that time and strength wasted; all the
suffering from extra and unprofitable fatigue produced to the
labourer and to his children; every instance in which the parent
may have traced the moral ruin of his child to the undermining of
delicacy by the over-crowding of cottages, or to the
contaminating influences of the public gang, must have been so
many incentives to feelings in the minds of the labouring poor
which can be well understood, and which it would be needless to
particularise. They must be conscious that much bodily and mental
pain has thus been inflicted upon them from causes for which they
were in no way answerable; to which, had it been in their power,
they would have in no way consented; and against which they were
powerless to struggle." (l.c., p. xx, 82, and xxiii, n. 96)

116. Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867 persons; 1811,
6,084,996; 1821, 6,869,544; 1831, 7,828,347; 1841, 8,222,664.

117. The result would be found yet more unfavourable if we went
further back. Thus: Sheep in 1865, 3,688,742, but in 1856,
3,694,294. Pigs in 1865, 1,299,893, but in 1858, 1,409,883.

118. Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Lond.,
1866.

119. The total yearly income under Schedule D is different in
this table from that which appears in the preceding ones, because
of certain deductions allowed by law.

120. If the product also diminishes relatively per acre, it must
not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has
indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without as much as
allowing it cultivators the means for making up the constituents
of the soil that had been exhausted.

121. As Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the
"principle of population," Th. Sadler, before the publication of
his work on population, issued his famous book, "Ireland, its
Evils and their Remedies." 2nd edition, London, 1829. Here, by
comparison of the statistics of the individual provinces, and of
the individual counties in each province, he proves that the
misery there is not, as Malthus would have it, in proportion to
the number of the population, but in inverse ratio to this.

122. Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of emigrants
amounted to 2,325,922.

123. According to a table in Murphy's "Ireland Industrial,
Political and Social," 1870, 94.6 per cent of the holdings do not
reach 100 acres. 5.4 exceed 100 acres.

124. "Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors on the Wages of
Agricultural Labourers in Dublin," 1870. See also "Agricultural
Labourers (Ireland). Return, etc." 8 March, 1861, London, 1862.

125. l.c., p. 29, 1.

126. l.c., p. 12

127. l.c., p. 12.

128. l.c., p. 25.

129. l.c., p.27.

130. l.c., p. 25.

131. l.c., p. 1.

132. l.c., p. 31, 32.

133. l.c., p. 25.

134. l.c., p. 30.

135. l.c., pp. 21, 13.

136. "Report of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866," p. 96.

137. The total area includes also peat, bogs, and waste land.

138. How the famine and its consequences have been deliberately
made the most of, both by the individual landlords and by the
English legislature, to forcibly carry out the agricultural
revolution and to thin the population of Ireland down to the
proportion satisfactory to the landlords, I shall show more fully
in Vol. III of this work, in the section on landed property.
There also I return to the condition of the small farmers and the
agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau W.
Senior says, with other thing, in his posthumous work, "Journals,
Conversations and Essays relating to Ireland." 2 vols. London
1868; Vol. II, p. 282. "Well," said Dr G., "we have got our Poor
Law and it is a great instrument for giving the victory to the
landlords. Another, and a still more powerful instrument is
emigration... No friend to Ireland can wish the war to be
prolonged [between the landlords and the small Celtic farmers] --
still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants. The
sooner it is over -- the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country
with the comparatively thin population which a grazing country
requires, the better for all classes." The English Corn Laws of
1815 secured Ireland the monopoly of the free importation of corn
into Great Britain. They favoured artificially, therefore, the
cultivation of corn. With the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846,
this monopoly was suddenly removed. Apart from all other
circumstances, this event alone was sufficient to give a great
impulse to the turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the
concentration of farms, and to the eviction of small cultivators.
After the fruitfulness of the Irish soil had been praised from
1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself destined
for the cultivation of wheat, English agronomists, economists,
politicians, discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to
produce forage. M. Leonce de Lavergne has hastened to repeat this
on the other side of the Channel. It takes a "serious" man, a la
Lavergne, to be caught by such childishness.