Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
Contents
Section 1 - The Increased Demand for Labour-Power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the same
Section 2 - Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that Accompanies it
Section 3 - Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus-Population or Industrial Reserve Army
Section 4 - Different Forms of the Relative Surplus-Population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation
Section 5 - Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
A. England from 1846-1866
B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class
C. The Nomad Population
D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the Working-Class
E. The British Agricultural Proletariat
F. Ireland
Section 1.
The Increased Demand for Labour-Power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remainnng 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, &c., 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, &c., 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? ... As they [the poor] ought
to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving.
If 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, &c., 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 {defining characteristic] of capitalistic production. Labour-power is
sold to-day, 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, &c., 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 much, with low prices too little [8]
money is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding
of facts [9] 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 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. [10]
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,
&C., 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,
&c., 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, &c. 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 to-day in spinning
is 7/8 constant and 1/8 variable, whilst at the beginning of the 18th century
it was ½ constant and ½ variable, on the other hand, the mass of raw
material, instruments of labour, &c., that a certain quantity of spinning
labour consumes productively to-day, 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 where as 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 demands, caeteris 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. To-day, 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.
[12]
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 — to-day —
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. [13]
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, &c.,
so that, as the capital increases, instead of ½ of its total value, only
1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, &c., 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 relativity
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. [14]
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 it itself is made relatively
superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population; and it does
this to an always increasing extent. [15] 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 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,
&c. — 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, &c.,
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 modem 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 modem 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 modem 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.” [16]
Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modem 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.” [17]
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.”
[18]
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 over-work 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 overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.
The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness
by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of
enriching the individual capitalists, [19] 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 to-morrow 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., &c. 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, &c. 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 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.” [20]
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 dés sont pipés.
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,
&c., 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, &c. — 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. [21]
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.” [22]
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 nonagricultural industries.) [23]
This source of relative surplus-population is thus constantly flowing.
But the constant flow towards the towns pre-supposes, 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. [24]
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, &c., the mutilated, the sickly,
the widows, &c. 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. [25] This antagonistic
character of capitalistic accumulation 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 (il 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 alia 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,” &c. [26]
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. [27] 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.”
[28]
Storch asks himself in what then really consists
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 to-day 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.” [29]
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.” [30]
Section 5.
Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
A. England from 1846-1866
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, &c., 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, [31]
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, &c.), amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38% or 3 5/12% annually.
Under this head the following categories show the greatest increase:
Excess of annual income
of 1864 over that of 1853 |
Increase
per year |
| Houses |
38.60% |
3.50% |
| Quarries |
84.76% |
7.70% |
| Mines |
68.85% |
6.26% |
| Ironworks |
39.92% |
3.63% |
| Fisheries |
57.37% |
5.21% |
| Gasworks |
126.02% |
11.45% |
| Railways |
83.29% |
7.57% |
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.
[32] 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. [33]
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. [34]
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 4½ years. [35]
The centralisation will, however, be best seen from a short analysis of
the Income Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, &c.), 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. [36] 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. |
Year ending
April 5th, 1865. |
Income from
Profits |
Income from
People |
Income from
Profits |
Income from
People |
| Total Income |
£95,844,222 |
308,416 |
105,435,738 |
332,431 |
| of these |
57,028,289 |
23,334 |
64,554,297 |
24,265 |
| of these |
36,415,225 |
3,619 |
42,535,576 |
4,021 |
| of these |
22,809,781 |
832 |
27,555,313 |
973 |
| of these |
8,744,762 |
91 |
11,077,238 |
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 |
£58,842,377 |
| 1849 |
63,596,052 |
| 1856 |
115,826,948 |
| 1860 |
135,842,817 |
| 1865 |
165,862,402 |
| 1866[37] |
188,917,563 |
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.”
[38]
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.” [39]
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 the 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.” [40]
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. [41]
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.” [42]
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, because many of the necessaries
of life are becoming dearer” (he believes because 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.” [43]
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 [44] 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.
[45]
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, needlewomen, 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.” [46]
Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part
of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed. [47] 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.” [48]
(“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.”)
[49]
The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the
above-named categories of purely town-dwelling work-people, 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 |
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 11½ 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. 2½d., needle-women 2s. 7d., kid-glovers 2s. 9½d., shoemakers
2s 7 3/4d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6 1/4d. For the silk-weavers of Macclesfield
the average was only 1s. 8½d. The worst categories were the needle-women,
silk-weavers and kid-glovers. [50] 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 in-door 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.” [51]
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, &c., the widening of
streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the
introduction of tramways, &c., 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, [52] 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, &c., 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)
exports 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.,
over-crowding] 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.” [53]
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.” [54] “It is not too much to say that
life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal.” [55]
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.” [56]
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.”
[57]
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 goods on their backs, without
any resting place but the workhouse.” [58]
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.” [59]
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 the 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 demolishing 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.” [60]
Admire this capitalistic justice! The owner, of land, of houses, the businessman,
when expropriated by “improvements” such as railroads, the building of
new streets, &c., 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 had 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 close-packed 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.” [61]
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.” [62]
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.”
[63]
As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the
state of the dwellings of an industrial town may to-day be bearable, tomorrow
hideous. Or the aedileship of the town may have pulled itself together
for the removal of the most shocking abuses. To-morrow, 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, [64]
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.” [65]
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.” [66]
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, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it carries into
the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp, small-pox, typhus,
cholera, scarlet fever, &c. [67] In undertakings
that involve much capital outlay, such as railways, &c., 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. [68]
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.” [69]
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. [70] 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, &c.,
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 neighborhood, 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 front
all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable.
“The lodging which
is obtained by the pitman 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 ground-plot 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.” [71]
“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.” [72]
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, &c. 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,
&c.] 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.’” [73]
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 bestpaid,
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 swidling companies. One
of the great London branches of industry involved in the catastrophe was
iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only over-produced
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.
[74] 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, but 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 house, 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. Ducpétiaux,
inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions, and member
of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his work:
“Budgets économiques 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 |
| mother |
300 working-days at fr. 0.89 |
fr. 267 |
| boy |
300 working-days at fr. 0.56 |
fr. 168 |
| girl |
300 working-days at fr. 0.55 |
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: by giving up
the Sunday diversions; by, in 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.” (Ducpétiaux, 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 Ducpétiaux. 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 product and accumulation
assert itself more brutally than in the progress of English agriculture
(including cattle-breeding) and the retrogression the English agricultural
labourer. Before I turn to his present situate 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,” [75]
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.” [76]
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.” [77]
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, &c., 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. [78]
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, &c., 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. [79]
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. [80] Of all the animals kept by the
farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocals, 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.” [81]
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.”
[82]
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. |
2 |
3 |
2 |
2 |
6 |
3 |
| (b) Number of Members in Family. |
4 |
5 |
4 |
4 |
8 |
5 |
| (c) Weekly Wage of the Men. |
8s. 0d. |
8s. 0d. |
8s. 0d. |
8s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
| (d) Weekly Wage of the Children. |
— |
— |
— |
— |
1/-, 1/6 |
1/-, 2/- |
| (e) Weekly Income of the whole Family. |
8s. 0d. |
8s. 0d. |
8s. 0d. |
8s. 0d. |
10s. 6d. |
7s. 0d. |
| (f) Weekly Rent. |
2s. 0d. |
1s. 6d. |
1s. 0d. |
1s. 0d. |
2s. 0d. |
1s. 4d. |
| (g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of Rent. |
6s. 0d. |
6s. 6d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
8s. 6d. |
5s. 8d. |
| (h) Weekly income per head. |
1s. 6d. |
1s. 3½d. |
1s. 9d. |
1s. 9d. |
1s. 0 3/4d. |
1s. 1½d. |
| SECOND VILLAGE |
| (a) Children. |
6 |
6 |
8 |
4 |
3 |
| (b) Number of Members in Family. |
8 |
8 |
10 |
6 |
5 |
| (c) Weekly Wage of the Men. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
| (d) Weekly Wage of the Children. |
1/-, 1/6 |
1/-, 1/6 |
— |
— |
— |
| (e) Weekly Income of the whole Family. |
10s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
| (f) Weekly Rent. |
1s. 6d. |
1s. 3½d. |
1s. 3½d. |
1s. 6½d. |
1s. 6½d. |
| (g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of Rent. |
8s. 6d. |
5s. 8½d. |
5s. 8½d. |
5s. 5½d. |
5s. 5½d. |
| (h) Weekly income per head. |
1s. 0 3/4d. |
0s. 8½d. |
0s. 7d. |
0s. 11d. |
1s. 1d. |
| THIRD VILLAGE |
| (a) Children. |
4 |
3 |
0 |
| (b) Number of Members in Family. |
6 |
5 |
2 |
| (c) Weekly Wage of the Men. |
7s. 0d. |
7s. 0d. |
5s. 0d. |
| (d) Weekly Wage of the Children. |
- |
1/- 2/- |
1/- 2/6 |
| (e) Weekly Income of the whole Family. |
7s. 0d. |
11s. 6d. |
5s. 0d. |
| (f) Weekly Rent. |
1s. 0d. |
0s. 10d. |
1s. 0d. |
| (g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of Rent. |
6s. 0d. |
10s. 8d. |
4s. 0d. |
| (h) Weekly income per head.[84] |
1s. 0d. |
2s. 1 3/5d. |
2s. 0d. |
The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English agriculture.
[83] 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 numeral 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. [85] 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. [86] 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,” [87]
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 ariem,
to have made him drunk with happiness.
But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the
English agricultural labourer of to-day, 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. [88] Dr. Julian Hunter,
in his epochmaking 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 ...
[89] The means [of subsistence] being always supposed
to be a fixed quantity. [90] 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.”
[91]
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,” [92] 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.” [93]
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? ...” [94] “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.’” [95]
From
the tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled the
annexed comparative summary.
| WEEKLY AMOUNT OF NUTRIENTS |
| |
Quantity Of
Nitrogenous
Ingredients |
Quantity Of
Non-Nitro-
genous In-
gredients |
Quantity Of
Mineral
Matter |
TOTAL |
| |
Ounces |
Ounces |
Ounces |
Ounces |
| Portland (convict) |
28.95 |
150.06 |
4.68 |
183.69 |
| Sailor in the 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[96] |
17.73 |
118.06 |
3.29 |
139.08 |
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.” [97]
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.” [98]
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[99] |
43,366 |
2,4341 |
“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. [100] 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 [101] ... 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 houseroom
4½ 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. [102]
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. [103]
.... 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. [104] 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 en 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. [105] 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.” [106]
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, &c.
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 Fambridge, 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 8 people slept, was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2 inches
broad, 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 |
| House |
No. 1. |
No. 2. |
No. 3. |
No. 4. |
No. 5. |
No. 6. |
No. 7. |
No. 8. |
No. 9. |
No. 10. |
No. 11. |
No. 12. |
| Bedrooms. |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
| Adults. |
3 |
4 |
4 |
5 |
2 |
5 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
2 |
3 |
2 |
| Children. |
5 |
3 |
4 |
4 |
2 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
0 |
3 |
3 |
4 |
| Number of Persons. |
8 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
4 |
8 |
6 |
5 |
2 |
.5 |
6 |
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
2030 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, &c.; 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 Is. 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, &c., 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 more slaves of the landed proprietors and the farmers.
[107] 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, &c., 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. [108] “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. [109]
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.” [110]
The soil requires much light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain
processes of manuring, removing of stones, &c. 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, [111]
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 retums home at the head of the procession reeling drunk, propped
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, [112] 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,
[113] clearly does not exist for the sake of the gang-master. it exists for the enrichment of the large farmers, [114] and indirectly of the landlords. [115] 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 [116] 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. [117] The cleanly weeded land, and the uncleanly human weeds, of Lincolnshire, are pole and counterpole
of capitalistic production. [118]
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
5½ 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 5/16 ths of its people. [119] 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.
Table A
| LIVE-STOCK |
| Year |
Horses |
Cattle |
Sheep |
Pigs |
Total
Number |
Decrease |
Total
Number |
Decrease |
Increase |
Total
Number |
Decrease |
Increase |
Total
Number |
Decrease |
Increase |
| 1860 |
619,811 |
— |
3,606,374 |
— |
— |
3,542,080 |
— |
— |
1,271,072 |
— |
— |
| 1861 |
614,232 |
5,579 |
3,471,688 |
134,686 |
— |
3,556,050 |
— |
13,970 |
1,102,042 |
169,030 |
— |
| 1862 |
602,894 |
11,338 |
3,254,890 |
216,798 |
— |
3,456,132 |
99,918 |
— |
1,154,324 |
— |
52,282 |
| 1863 |
579,978 |
22,916 |
3,144,231 |
110,659 |
— |
3,308,204 |
147,982 |
— |
1,067,458 |
86,866 |
— |
| 1864 |
562,158 |
17,820 |
3,262,294 |
— |
118,063 |
3,366,941 |
— |
58,737 |
1,058,480 |
8,978 |
— |
| 1865 |
547,867 |
14,291 |
3,493,414 |
— |
231,120 |
3,688,742 |
— |
321,801 |
1,299,893 |
— |
241,413 |
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 of a million. From the above
table it results: —
| Horses |
Cattle |
Sheep |
Pigs |
| Absolute Decrease |
Absolute Decrease |
Absolute Increase |
Absolute Increase |
| 71,944 |
112,960 |
146,662 |
28,8211[120] |
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, marigolds, beet-root, cabbages, carrots,
parsnips, vetches. &c.
Table B
| INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CROPS AND GRASS
IN ACREAGE |
| Year |
Cereal
Crop |
Green
Crop |
Grass and
Clover |
Flax |
Total
Cultivated
Land |
Decrease
(Acres) |
Decrease
(Acres) |
Increase
(Acres) |
Decrease
(Acres) |
Increase
(Acres) |
Decrease
(Acres) |
Increase
(Acres) |
Decrease
(Acres) |
Increase
(Acres) |
| 1861 |
15,701 |
36,974 |
— |
47,969 |
— |
— |
19,271 |
81,373 |
— |
| 1862 |
72,734 |
74,785 |
— |
— |
6,623 |
— |
2,055 |
138,841 |
— |
| 1863 |
144,719 |
19,358 |
— |
— |
7,724 |
— |
63,922 |
92,431 |
— |
| 1864 |
122,437 |
2,317 |
— |
— |
47,486 |
— |
87,761 |
— |
10,493 |
| 1865 |
72,450 |
— |
25,241 |
— |
68,970 |
50,159 |
— |
28,398 |
— |
| 1861-65 |
428,041 |
108,193 |
— |
— |
82,834 |
— |
122,8501 |
330,350 |
— |
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 101,543 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, &c.: the decrease in potatoes was 446,398 tons,
although the area of their cultivation increased in 1865.
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, &c.; and the
Schedules C. and E., in which no special details are given, include the
incomes of employees, officers, State sinecurists, State fundholders, &c.
Table C [121]
INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CULTIVATION,
PRODUCT PER ACRE, AND TOTAL PRODUCT OF 1865 COMPARED WITH 1864 |
| Product |
Acres of
Cultivated Land |
Product
per Acre |
Total Product |
| 1864 |
1865 |
Increase or
Decrease, 1865 |
1864 |
1865 |
Increase or
Decrease, 1865 |
1864 |
1865 |
Increase or
Decrease, 1865 |
| Wheat |
276,483 |
266,989 |
— |
9,494 |
cwt., 13.3 |
13.0 |
— |
0.3 |
875,782 Qrs. |
826,783 Qrs. |
— |
48,999 Qrs. |
| Oats |
1,814,886 |
1,745,228 |
— |
69,658 |
cwt., 12.1 |
12.3 |
0.2 |
— |
7,826,332 Qrs. |
7,659,727 Qrs. |
— |
166,605 Qrs. |
| Barley |
172,700 |
177,102 |
4,402 |
— |
cwt., 15.9 |
14.9 |
— |
1.0 |
761,909 Qrs. |
732,017 Qrs. |
— |
29,892 Qrs. |
| Bere |
8,894 |
10,091 |
1,197 |
— |
cwt., 16.4 |
14.8 |
— |
1.6 |
15,160 Qrs. |
13,989 Qrs. |
— |
1,171 Qrs. |
| Rye |
cwt., 8.5 |
10.4 |
1.9 |
— |
12,680 Qrs. |
18,314 Qrs. |
5,684 Qrs. |
— |
| Potatoes |
1,039,724 |
1,066,260 |
26,536 |
— |
tons, 4.1 |
3.6 |
— |
0.5 |
4,312,388 ts. |
3,865,990 ts. |
— |
446,398 ts. |
| Turnips |
337,355 |
334,212 |
— |
3,143 |
tons, 10.3 |
9.9 |
— |
0.4 |
3,467,659 ts. |
3,301,683 ts. |
— |
165,976 ts. |
Mangold-
wurzel |
14,073 |
14,389 |
316 |
— |
tons, 10.5 |
13.3 |
2.8 |
— |
147,284 ts. |
191,937 ts. |
44,653 ts. |
— |
| Cabbages |
31,821 |
33,622 |
1,801 |
— |
tons, 9.3 |
10.4 |
1.1 |
— |
297,375 ts. |
350,252 ts. |
52,877 ts. |
— |
| Flax |
301,693 |
251,433 |
— |
50,260 |
st. (14 lb.) 34.2 |
25.2 |
— |
9.0 |
64,506 st. |
39,561 st. |
— |
24,945 st. |
| Hay |
1,609,569 |
1,678,493 |
68,9241 |
— |
tons, 1.6 |
1.8 |
0.2 |
— |
2,607,153 ts. |
3,068,707 ts. |
461,554 ts. |
— |
Table D
THE INCOME-TAX ON THE SUBJOINED INCOMES IN POUNDS STERLING
(Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Lond. 1866.) |
| |
1860 |
1861 |
1862 |
1863 |
1864 |
1865 |
Schedule A.
Rent of Land |
13,893,829 |
13,003,554 |
13,398,938 |
13,494,091 |
13,470,700 |
13,801,616 |
Schedule B.
Farmers’ Profits. |
2,765,387 |
2,773,644 |
2,937,899 |
2,938,923 |
2,930,874 |
2,946,072 |
Schedule D.
Industrial,
&c., Profits |
4,891,652 |
4,836,203 |
4,858,800 |
4,846,497 |
4,546,147 |
4,850,199 |
Total Schedules
A to E |
22,962,885 |
22,998,394 |
23,597,574 |
23,658,631 |
23,236,298 |
23,930,340 |
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 [122]
SCHEDULE D.
INCOME FROM PROFITS (OVER £6O) IN IRELAND |
| |
1864
£ |
1865
£ |
Total yearly
income of |
4,368,610 divided
among 17,467 persons. |
4,669,979 divided
among 18,081 persons. |
Yearly income
over £60
and under £100 |
238,726 divided
among 5,015 persons. |
222,575 divided
among 4,703 persons. |
Of the yearly
total income |
1,979,066 divided
among 11,321 persons. |
2,028,571 divided
among 12,184 persons. |
Remainder of the
total yearly income |
2,150,818 divided
among 1,131 persons. |
2,418,833 divided
among 1,194 persons. |
| Of these |
1,073,906 divided
among 1,010 persons. |
1,097,927 divided
among 1,044 persons. |
1,076,912 divided
among 121 persons. |
1,320,906 divided
among 150 persons. |
430,535 divided
among 95 persons. |
584,458 divided
among 2 persons. |
646,377divided
among 26 |
736,448 divided
among 28 |
262,819 divided
among 3 |
274,528 divided
among 3 |
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, [123]
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, &c., 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
naïveté of the schoolmaster could apply, to the conditions
of production and population of the nineteenth century, the standard of
the 14th, this naïveté, 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. [124]
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. [125]
What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind
and freed from the surplus-population? That the relative surplus-population
is to-day 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.
[126] 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 modem 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). [127] 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 |
Provisions and
Necessaries. |
Clothing. |
TOTAL. |
| 29th Sept., 1849. |
1s. 3 1/4d. |
3d. |
1s. 6 1/4d. |
| 29th Sept., 1869. |
2s. 7 1/4d. |
6d. |
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; to-day, 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.” [128]
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, &c.; in the east, in Wicklow, Wexford,
&c.; in the centre of Ireland, in King’s and Queen’s County,, Dublin,
&c.; in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, &c.
“The agricultural
labourers’ huts,” an inspector cries out, “are a disgrace to the Christianity
and to the civilisation of this country.” [129]
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.” [130]
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 comers, 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.” [131]
“ The towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed
to be the surplus-labour of the rural division;” [132]
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.” [133] 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;” [134]
that “from the digging out of the main crop of potatoes in October until
the early spring following ... there is no employment for them;” [135]
and further, that during the active times they “are subject to broken days
and to all kinds of interruptions.” [136]
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, &c., 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.” [137]
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.” [138]
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 dare 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.’” [139]
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 £262,819;
that in 1865, however, out of £4,669,979 total profits, the same
three virtuosi of “abstinence” pocketed £274,528; 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, £1,076,912;
in 1865, 150 surplus-value makers, £1,320,906; in 1864, 1,131 surplus-value
makers £2,150,818, nearly half of the total annual profit; in 1865,
1,194 surplus-value makers, £2,418,833, 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 [140] |
|
No. |
Acres |
(1) Farms not
over 1 acre. |
48,653 |
25,394 |
(2) Farms over 1,
not over 5 acres. |
82,037 |
288,916 |
(3) Farms over 5,
not over 15 acres. |
176,368 |
1,836,310 |
(4) Farms over 15,
not over 30 acres. |
136,578 |
3,051,343 |
(5) Farms over 30,
not over 50 acres. |
71,961 |
2,906,274 |
(6) Farms over 50,
not over 100 acres. |
54,247 |
3,983,880 |
(7) Farms over
100 acres. |
31,927 |
8,227,807 |
| (8) TOTAL AREA. |
— |
26,319,924 |
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’appétit vient en mangeant, Rentroll’s eyes will
soon discover that Ireland, with 3½ 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.” [141]
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.
[A cruel fate torments the Romans,
and the crime of fratricide]
Footnotes
1. Karl Marx, l. c., “A égalité
d’oppression des masses, plus un pays a de prolétaires et plus il
est riche.” (Colins, “L’Economie Politique. Source des Révolutions
et des Utopies, prétendues Socialistes.” Paris, 1857, t. III., p.
331.) Our “prolétarian” 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. Remarks, 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 riches and strength for 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 propriété.” [The spirit of laws is property]
5. Eden, l. c., Vol. 1, book I., 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 Poe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., 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, &c., 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,
“Théorie 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, fumished
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
best 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 be safe to breed up 24,000 ministers, for then the twelve thousand
which are unprovided for, will seek 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 his time is shown 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 up to our view as ‘perfectly wise and virtuous,’
the character and conduct of 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 Red 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 wouid have believed that the moon some times disappeared
in a clcar 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 suspicions as to Adam Smith having invented the category of “unproductive
labourers,” solely for the Protestant parsons, inspite 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. Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism
to the Russian edition: The MS in the first case says “little” and in the
second case “much"; the correction has been introduced according to the
authorised French translation.
9. Cf. Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik der Politischen
Oekonomie,” pp. 166, seq.
10. “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
of 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. The census of England and Wales
shows: all persons employed in agriculture (landlords, farmers, gardeners,
shepherds, &c., 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; 1861, 31,647 — 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. Coal-mining: 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. Ill. London,
1863, p. 36.)
15. 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,
and not of fixed 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.)
16. H. Merivale. “Lectures on Colonisation
and Colonies,” 1841, Vol. I , p. 146.
17. Malthus, “Principles of Political
Economy,” pp. 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.
18. Harriet Martineau, “A Manchester
Strike,” 1832, p. 101.
19. Even in the cotton famine of 1863
we find, in a pamphlet of the operative cottonspinners 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 of working over-time 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, that in such cases a set of workmen have combined to distress
the employer by idling a whole day together.” (“Essay, &c.,” pp. 27,
28.) The fellows in fact were hankering after a rise in wages.
20. Economist, Jan. 21. 1860.
21. 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.)
22. 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.
23. 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. &c.,” pp. 11
and 12.)
24. “Poverty seems favourable to generation.” (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of God, according
to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani “Iddio af che gli uomini che
esercitano mestieri di prima utiliti nascono abbondantemente.” (Galiani,
l. c., p. 78.) [God ordains that men who carry on trades of primary utility are born in abundance] “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.”
25. “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 catactère simple, mais un caractère
de duplicité; que dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels se
produit la richesse, la misére se produit aussi; que dans les mêmes
rapports dans lesquels il y a développement des forces productives,
il y a une force productive de répression; que ces rapports ne produisent
la richesse bourgeoise, c’est-à-dire la richesse de la classe bourgeoise,
qu’en anéantissant continuellement la richesse des membres intégrants
de cette classe et en produisant un prolétariat toujours croissant.”
[From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is also a force producing represion; that there relations produce bourgeois wealth, i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class, only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an evergrowing proletariat]
(Karl Marx: “Misère de la Philosophie,” p. 116.)
26. G. Ortes: “Delia 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 felicità de’popoli, mi limiterò a investigate la region
delta loro infelicità.” [Instead of projecting useless systems for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their unhappiness]
27. “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.”
28. Storch, l. c., t. iii, p. 223.
29. Sismondi, l. c., pp. 79, 80, 85.
30. Destutt de Tracy, l. c., p. 231:
“Les nations pauvres, c’est là où le peuple est à
son aise; et les nations riches, c’est là où il est ordinairement
pauvre.” [The poor nations are those where the people are comfortably off; and the rich nationss, those where the people are generaly poor]
31. “Tenth Report of the Commissioners
of H. M. Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1866. p. 38.
32. lbidem.
33. 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.)
34. “Census, &c.,” 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.
35. “Fourth Report, &c., of Inland
Revenue.” Lond., 1860, p. 17.
36. These are the net incomes after
certain legally authorised abatements.
37. 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.]
38. “Census, &C.,” l. c., P. 11.
39. 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.)
40. Gladstone in the House of Commons,
April 16th, 1863. Morning Star, April 17th.
41. 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, &c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending
dowries for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of
the means of subsistence is never forgotten there.
42. 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:
“Voilà l’homme en effet. Il va du blanc au noir,
Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.
Importun à tout autre, à soi-même incommode,
Il change à tout moment d’esprit comme de mode.”
[Such is the man: he goes from black to white. / He conmdemns in the morning what he felt in the evening. / A nuisance to everyone else, and an inconvenience to himself, / he changes his way of thinking as easily as he changes his way of dressing]
(“The Theory of Exchanges, &c.,” London, 1864, p. 135.)
43. 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.
44. Wales here is always included in
England.
45. A peculiar light is throwm 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.”
46. “Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864,”
p. 13.
47. l. c., p. 17.
48. l. c., p. 13.
49. l. c., Appendix, p. 232.
50. l. c., pp. 232, 233.
51. l. c., pp. 14, 15.
52. “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.
53. “Public Health, Eighth Report. 1866.” p. 14, note.
54. l. c., p. 89. With reference to
the children in these colonies, Dr. Hunter 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 msh 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.)
55. l. c., p. 62.
56. “Report of the Officer of Health
of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865.
57. Public Health, Eighth Report, 1866,”
p. 91.
58. l. c., p. 88.
59. l. c., p. 88.
60. l. c., p. 89.
61. l. c., p. 55 and 56.
62. l. c., p. 149.
63. l. c., p. 50.
64.
| COLLECTING AGENTS LIST (BRADFORD). |
| | Houses | |
| Vulcan Street, No. 122 | 1 room | 16 persons |
| Lumiev Street, No. 13 | 1 room | 11 persons |
| Bower Street, No. 41 | 1 room | 11 persons |
| ortland Street. No. 112 | 1 room | 10 persons |
| Hardy Street, No. 17 | 1 room | 10 persons |
| North Street, No. 18 | 1 room | 16 persons |
| North Street, No. 17 | 1 room | 13 persons |
| Wymer Street, No. 19 | 1 room | 8 adults |
| Jowett Street, No. 56 | 1 room | 12 persons |
| George Street, No. 150 | 1 room | 3 families |
| Rifle Court Marygate, No. 11 | 1 room | 11 persons |
| Marshall Street, No. 28 | 1 room | 10 persons |
| Marshall Street, No. 49 | 1 room | 3 families |
| George Street, No. 128 | 1 room | 18 persons |
| George Street, No. 130 | 1 room | 16 persons |
| Edward Street, No. 4 | 1 room | 17 persons |
| George Street, No. 49 | 1 room | 2 families |
| York Street, No. 34 | 1 room | 2 families |
| Salt Pie Street (bottom) | 2 room | 26 persons |
| | Cellars | |
| Regent Square | 1 cellar | 8 persons |
| Acre Street | 1 cellar | 7 persons |
| 33 Roberts Court | 1 cellar | 7 persons |
| Back Pratt Street used as a brazier’s shop | 1 cellar | 7 persons |
| 27 Ebenezer Street | 1 cellar | 6 persons |
| l. c., | p. iii. | (no male above 18). |
65. l. c., p. 114.
66. l. c., p. 50.
67. “Public Health. Seventh Report.
1865,” p. 18.
68. l. c., p. 165.
69. l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving
Officer of the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registar-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 raging for some time, and some deaths [amongst
the troglodytes] have been caused by it.” (l. c., note 2.)
70. 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.
71. l. c., pp. 180, 182.
72. l. c., pp. 515, 517.
73. l. c., p. 16.
74. “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 Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign enterprises.”
—Reynolds’ Newspaper, January 20th, 1867.
75. 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.
76. “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.
77. Dr. Richard Price: “Observations
on Reversionary Payments,” 6th Ed. By W. Morgan, Lond., 1803, v. 11., 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.”
78. Barton, l. c., p. 26. For the end
of the 18th century cf. Eden, l. c.
79. Parry, l. c., p. 86.
80. id., p. 213.
81. S. Laing, l. c., p. 62.
82. “England and America.” Lond., 1833,
Vol. 1, p. 47.
83. 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.
84. London Economist, May 29th,
1845, p. 290.
85. The decrease of the middle-class
farmers can be seen especially in the census category: “Farmer’s son, grandson,
brother, nephew, daughter, granddaughter, 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.
86. The number of shepherds increased
from 12,517 to 25,559.
87. Census, l. c., p. 36.
88. 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.
89. “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 earnitig a little
more, or for the farmer to lower the wage of the labourer, “because his
wife has found a trade,” l. c.
90. l. c., p. 135.
91. l. c., p. 134.
92. “Report of the Commissioners ...
relating to Transportation and Penal Servitude,” Lond., 1863, pp. 42, 50.
93. l. c., p. 77. “Memorandum by the
Lord Chief Justice.”
94. l. c., Vol. 11, Minutes of Evidence.
95. l. c., Vol. 1. Appendix, p. 280.
96. l. c., pp. 274, 275.
97. “Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864,
pp. 238, 249, 261, 262.
98. l. c., p. 262.
99. l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural
labourer receives only 1/4 as much milk, and ½ 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 southwest. All the doctors there agree that the increase of the death-rate
through tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration
of 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, pins
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 fioor, 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 cibins 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.
100. 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.
101. 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.
102. 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
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.
103. “The labourers’ houses (in the
open villages, which, of course, are always overcrowded) 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, candies, 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 birth-places 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.
104. “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.)
105. “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
of 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.)
106. “Public Health. Seventh Report,
1865,” pp. 9, 14 passim.
107. “The heaven-bom 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 mote 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 as 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 neighhours.”
108. 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 “prolétariat
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
Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.” 2nd edition. Hamburg, 1869, pp.
56, &c. 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, logés dans des trous,
Sous les combles, dans les décombres,
Nous vivons avec les hiboux
Et les larrons, amis des ombres.
[Badly clothed, living in holes, under the eaves, in the ruins, with the owls and the thieves, companions of the shadows]
109. “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.
110. “Child. Emp. Comm., VI. Report."
Evidence 173, p. 37.
111. Some gang-masters, however, have
worked themselves up to the position of farmers of 500 acres, or proprietors
of whole rows of houses.
112. “Half the girls of Ludford have
been ruined by going out” (in gangs). l. c., p. 6, § 32.
113. “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, § 174).
114. “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.)
115. 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.
116. “Gang work is cheaper than other
work; that is why they are employed,” says a former gang-master (l. c.,
p. 17, § 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,
§ 3.)
117. “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 is it 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?
118. 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 of 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 themselvat 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 fhe 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.)
119. Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867
persons; 1811, 6,084,996; 1821, 6,869,544; 1831, 7,828,347; 1841, 8,222,664.
120. 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.
121. The data of the text are put together
from the materials of the “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland, General Abstracts,
Dublin,” for the years 1860, el seq., and “Agricultural Statistics,
Ireland. Tables showing the estimated average produce, &c., 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 of 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 5 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
of 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep, and a decrease of
236,000 pigs.
122. 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.
123. 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 its cultivators the means for making up the constituents of
the soil that had been exhausted.
124. 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.
125. Between 1851 and 1874, the total
number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922.
126. According to a table in Murphy’s “Ireland Industrial, Political and Social,” 1870, 94.6 per cent. or the
holdings do not reach 100 acres, 5.4 exceed 100 acres.
127. “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.
128. l. c., pp. 29, 1.
129. l. c., p. 12.
130. l. c., p. 12.
131. l. c., p. 25.
132. l. c., p. 27.
133. l. c., p. 25.
134. l. c., p. 1.
135. l. c., pp. 31, 32.
136. l. c., p.. 25.
137. l. c., p. 30.
138. l. c., pp. 21, 13.
139. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” p. 96.
140. The total area includes also peat, bogs, and waste land.
141. 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 things, 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 arms, 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. Léonce de
Lavergne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of the Channel.
It takes a “serious” man, à la Lavergne, to be caught by such childishness.
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