 Chapter 25, Section 5, Part E, of Capital Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1, by Karl Marx, translated from the 3rd German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Averling, and edited by Frederick Engels. Chapter 7, The Accumulation of Capital. Chapter 25, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. Section 5, Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. Part E, The British Agricultural Protariat. 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 of the English agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid retrospect. Modern agricultural dates in England from the middle of the 18th century, although the revolution in the 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, that was superficial thinker as to the agricultural labourer of 1771, the letter plays a very pitchable part compared with his predecessor of the end of the 14th century. Quote, when a labourer could live in plenty and accumulate wealth. End quote. Footnote. James E. Thorald Rogers, professor of political economy in the University of Oxford, a history of agriculture and prizes in England. Oxford 1866, volume 1, page 690. This work, The Fruit of Patient and Deligent 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 prizes of the time that we possess. End footnote. Not to speak of the 15th century. Quote, the golden age of the English labourer in town and country. End quote. We need not, however, go back so far. In a very instructive work for 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. End quote. Footnote. Reasons for the late increase of the poor rates, or a comparative view of the prizes of labour and provisions, London 1777, pages 5 and 11, end footnote. It is then proved in detail that the real agricultural wages between 1737 and 1777 fell nearly one quarter, or twenty-five percent. Quote. Modern policy, says Dr. Richard Price, also, quote, 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, end quote. Footnote. Dr. Richard Price. Observations on Reversionary Payments, sixth edition, by W. Morgan, London, 1803. Volume 11, pages 158 and 159. Price remarks on page 159, quote, the nominal prize 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, end quote, end footnote. Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780, with regard to his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect, amusements, etc., is an ideal never attained again since that time. His average wage, expressed in pints of wheat, was from 1770 to 1771, 90 pints. In Eden's time, 1797, only 65, in 1808, but 60. Barton, Lococitato, page 26, for the end of the 18th century, see Eden, Lococitato. End footnote. The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the anti-Jackabin War, during which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stockbrokers, army contractors, etc., and riched themselves so extraordinarily, has been already indicated above. The nominal wages rose in consequence partly of the banknote 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 serve 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 seven shillings, six pence. The total yearly expenditure of a family of six persons, thirty-six pounds, twelve shillings and five pence. Their total income, twenty-nine pounds and eighteen shillings. Deficit made good by the parish, six pounds, fourteen shillings, five pence. In 1814, in the same county, the weekly wage was twelve shillings, two pence. The total yearly expenditure of a family of five persons, fifty-four pounds, eighteen shillings and four pence. Their total income, thirty-six pounds, two shillings. Deficit made good by the parish, eighteen pounds, six shillings, four pence. FOOTNOT PERRY, LOGO CITATO PAGE 86 AND FOOTNOT. In 1795, the deficit was less than a quarter the wage. In 1814, more than half, it is self-evident that, under these circumstances, the meager comforts that Eden still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer, had vanished by 1814. FOOTNOT PERRY, LOGO CITATO PAGE 213 AND FOOTNOT. Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocals, was then forth the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated. The same state of things went on quietly until, quote, the swing riots in 1830 revealed to us, that is, the ruling classes, by the light of blazing cornstacks that misery and black mutinous discontent smoldered quite as fiercely under the surface of agricultural as of manufacturing England, end, quote, FOOTNOT. US LANE, LOGO CITATO PAGE 62 AND FOOTNOT. At this time, settler 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, quote, the peasant of the south of England is not a freeman, nor is he a slave, he is a pauper, end, quote, FOOTNOT. England and America, London, 1833, volume 1, page 47, end, FOOTNOT. The time just before the repeal of the corn laws threw a 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 Shardsbury, 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 the landlords. The following list gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blandford, Wimborn and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr. G. Banks and of the Earl of Shardsbury. It will be noted that, just like Banks, this low church pope, this head of English pietists, pockets a great part of the miserable wages the labourers under the pretext of house rent. The memory of the three tables given, they show the details of fourteen families from three villages and gives numbers for the number of children in the families, the number of members in each family, the weekly wage of the men and the weekly wage of the children, totally into a weekly income of the whole family, which ranges from five shillings to eleven shilling sixpence. It then goes on to list the weekly rent, which ranges from ten pence to two shillings. In the next line, the total weekly wage after deduction of the rent is given, ending up with the weekly income per head, which ranges from seven pence to two shillings, one three fifth pence, and a table, footnote. London, economist, May 29th, 1845, page 290, end footnote. The repeal of the Cornelaws gave a marvellous impulse to the English agriculture, footnote. 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, end footnote. Drainage on the most extensive scale, new methods of stall feeding, end 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, declared 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, footnote. The decrees 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 persons. 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 20 years, the number of large farms increased. Those of 300 to 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. 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 rapid warrants and poor pastures into magnificent cornfields. 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 laborers of both sexes and of all ages are concerned, their number fell from 1,241,396 in 1851, to 1,163,217 in 1861. Footnote. The number of shepherds increased from 12,517 to 25,559, and footnote. If the English Registrar General therefore rightly remarks, The increase of farmers and farm laborers since 1801 bears no kind of proportion to the increase of agricultural produce. Footnote. Senses, Logoceteto, page 36, and Footnote. 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 product 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, that is, the towns, and the reign of free trade, then the agricultural laborer was at last, post tot discriminar erum, placed in circumstances that ought, secondum ariam, to have made him drunk with happiness. But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the English agricultural laborer of today, not to speak of his predecessor in the last half of the 14th and in the 15th century, but only compared with his predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has changed the worst to an extraordinary extent, that, quote, the peasant has again become a serve, and a serve worse-fet and worse-clothed. Footnote. Rogers, Locus Hiteto, page 693, page 10. Mr. Rogers belongs to the liberal school, is a personal friend of Copton and Bright, and therefore no Laudato Temporis Acti. And footnote. Dr. Julian Hunter, in his apoc-making report on the dwellings of the agricultural laborers, says, quote, the cost of the hind, a name for the agricultural laborer, inherited from the time of servdom, 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. Footnote. Public Health, 7th Report, 1865, page 242. It is therefore nothing unusual either for the landlord to raise laborer's rent as soon as he hears that he is earning a little more, or for the farmer to lower the wage of the laborer, because his wife has found a trade, Locus Hiteto, and footnote. The means of subsistence being always supposed to be a fixed quantity, footnote. Locus Hiteto, page 135, and footnote. As to any further reduction of his income, he may say, nihil habio, nihil curil. 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. Commod will, he has no share either in prosperity or adversity. End, quote, footnote. Locus Hiteto, page 134, and footnote. 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, quote, 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. Footnote. Report of the commissioners relating to transportation and penal servitude, London 1863, pages 42 and 50, and footnote. 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. End, quote, footnote. Locus Hiteto, page 77, now run by the Lord Chief Justice, end, footnote. A few characteristic depositions of witnesses. John Smith, Governor of the Edinburgh Prison, deposes, quote, Number 5056. The diet of the English prisons is superior to that of ordinary labourers in England. Number 50. It is the fact that the ordinary agricultural labourers in Scotland very seldom get any meat at all. Answer, number 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. Number 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 near the approaching to the dietary of free labourers? Footnote. Locus Hiteto, volume 11, minutes of evidence, end, footnote. 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, end, quote, footnote. Locus Hiteto, volume 1, appendix, page 280, end, footnote. From the tables appended to the first volume of the report, I have compiled the annexed comparative summary. This table lists the weekly amount of nutrients of a convict in Portland, a sailor in the Navy, a soldier, a working coachmaker, compositor, and an agricultural labourer, showing that the compositor and the agricultural labourer are the lowest of them all. End table. 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 labourer's 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 Harz. The nourishment obtained by the labourer himself, says Dr E. Smith, quote, 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 poor 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, end quote, footnote. Public Health Six Report 1864, pages 238, 249, 261 and 262, end footnote. 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, quote, 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, end quote, footnote. Logoceteto, page 262, end footnote. One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was that the agricultural labour 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 weakly consumed by an average agricultural adult. England, grains of carbon 46673, grains of nitrogen 1594. Wales, grains of carbon 48354, grains of nitrogen 2031. Scotland, grains of carbon 48980, grains of nitrogen 2348. Ireland, grains of carbon 43366, grains of nitrogen 24344. Footnote. Logoceteto, page 17. The English agricultural labour receives only a quart as much milk and half as much bread as the Irish. Arthur Young and his tour in Ireland at the beginning of this century already noticed the better nourishment of the letter. 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, serophila, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of the physical condition of the population, and all ascribe this deterioration to poverty. His, the farm labourers 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, quote, the abandonment of the solid homespun clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods, end quote, and of stronger drinks for the so-called tea. Quote, the agriculturalist 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 sulfurous 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 sudden thatch, every crevice is topped to maintain warmth, and in an atmosphere of diabolic odour, with a mud floor, with his only clothes drying on his back, he often subsents sleeps with his wife and children. Obstetricians, who have passed parts of the night in such cabins, have described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of the floor, and they were forced, easy task, to drill a hole through the wall to affect a little private respiration. It was attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of life, that to these incineratory influences, and many more, the underfed peasant was nightly exposed, and of the result, a debilitated and scruffless people, there was no want of evidence. The statements of the relieving officers of Carmarthenshire and Cardenshire show in a striking way the same state of things, there is besides, quote, a plague more horrible still, the great number of idiots, end quote. Now a word on the climatic conditions, quote, a strong southwest wind blows over the whole country for eight or nine months in a 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 in the sun-bank, or are often in a ravine or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and native cattle can live on the pestures. The young people migrate to the eastern mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth. Carmarthenshire is a breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital. The population can therefore barely maintain its numbers, end quote. Thus in Carmarthenshire, 1851 there were 45,155 males and 52,459 females, while in 1861 there were 44,446 males and 52,955 females. Dr. Hunter's report in Public Health Center report 1865 pages 498 to 502, end footnote, quote, to the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of the house accommodation generally had, says Dr. Simon in his official health report, quote, by our agricultural laborers, almost every page of Dr. Hunter's report bears testimony, and gradually, for many years past, the state of the laborer 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 has been the case. Especially within the last 20 or 30 years the evil has been a very rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the laborer are now in the highest degree deplorable. Excepting so far as they whom his labor 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 pressures 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 laborer's dwellings, much less of decent dwellings, shall be upon it, nor does any law reserve for the laborer 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. Footnote. In 1865 this law was improved to some extent, it will soon be learned from experience that tinkering of this sword is of no use. And footnote. Under this influence, each parish has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident laborers, for unhappily agricultural labor instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-working laborer and his family implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual poor prism, a poor prism 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 residents of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly in addition to its poor rates. Large proprietors have but to resolve that there shall be no laborer's dwellings on their estates and their estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsibility for the poor. Footnote. 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 a letter that building speculators can build cottages and lodging houses, and footnote. How far it has been intended in the English Constitution and law that this kind of unconditional property and land should be acquirable and that the 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 labor. 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 five and a third percent greater, into house room four and a half percent 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 gamekeepers are allowed to live, regular servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class. Footnote. 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. For example, near-market harbour is a sheep farm of about five hundred 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 chilling a week for lodging, that he must find far away in an open village. And footnote. 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 closed 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 raids will be somewhat lightened. While great owners are thus escaping from poor raids 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 they 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 farm work is done by his wife and children is done at the same disadvantage, nor is this nearly all the toil which 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. Footnote, quote, 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. End, quote, Dr. Hunter's report, Lococitato, page 135. Very often the beer-seller 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. Quote, the hind with his ten shillings a week, minus a rent of four pounds a year, is obliged to buy at the seller's own terms his modicum of tea, sugar, flour, soap, candy, and beer. End, quote, Lococitato, page 132. These open villages form in fact the penal sediments of the English agricultural proletariat. Many of the cottages are simply lodging houses through which all the rebel 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, a fashion amongst the aristocratic shilocks to shrug their shoulders ferociously at the building speculators, the small landlords, and the open villages. They know well enough that their close villages and show villages are the birthplaces of open villages and could not exist without them. The labourers, or 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. End, quote, Lococitato, page 135. The system of open and closed villages obtains in all the Midland counties and throughout the east of England. End, footnote. 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 style good enough for their labour and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent. Footnote. Quote. The employer is, directly or indirectly, securing to himself the profit on a man employed at Tenchlings a week, and receiving from this poor hind four or five pounds annual rent for houses not worth twenty pounds in a really free market, but maintain that 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 be gone of the week's notice, take your pig with you, and get what she 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, that is, the farmer, as the penalty for leaving a service. End quote. Dr. Hunter, Locas Aeteto, page 132. End footnote. 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 labour 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 reproached 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 overcrowding of rural labourer's dwellings has been a matter of deep concern not only to persons who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For, again and again, in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic disease in rural districts have insisted on the extreme importance of that overcrowding 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 crowning which so favours the extension of contagious disease also favours the origination of disease which is not contagious, and those who have denounced the overcrowded 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 per force, they have referred to other relations of 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. Footnote. Quote, 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. End quote. Dr. Hunter, Locus Ceteto, page 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, quote, Their boldness and shamelessness I never saw equaled 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, end quote. The Child Employment Commission, 6th Report, 1867, page 77, end twit note. Thus, for instance, in the appendix of my last annual report, Dr. Ault, reporting on an outbreak of fever and wing in Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who had come hither from wind-grave 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, ten persons in all. A few weeks ago, thirteen persons slept in it, end quote. Footnote. Public Health, 7th Report, 1865, pages 9 and 14, end footnote. 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 Wrestling-worth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, although many are smaller than this. The small, one-storeyed cots are often divided by partitions into two bedrooms, one bed frequently in a kitchen, five feet six inches in height, rent, three pounds a year. The tenants have to make their own privies, the landlord only supplies a whole. 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 curtsy. 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 seventeen houses visited, only four had more than one bedroom, and those four overcrowded. The cots with one bedroom, sheltered three adults and three children, a married couple with six children, etc. Dunton. High rents from four to five pounds, weekly wages of the man, ten shillings. They hoped to pay the rent by the straw plating of the family. The higher the rent, the greater the number that must work together to pay it. Six adults living with four children in one sleeping apartment, pay three pounds ten shillings for it. The cheapest house in Dunton, fifteen feet long externally, ten broad, led for three pounds. Only one of the houses investigated had two bedrooms. A little outside the village, a house whose tenants dunked against the house's side, the lower nine 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 three adults and five children. Dunton is not worse than the rest of Bigel's Wedge Union. Two. Barksha. Beenaam. In June 1864 a man, his wife, and four children lived in a cot, one-storey 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, one shillings a week, one bedroom for men, wife, and six children. One house led for eight pence a week, fourteen feet six inches long, seven feet broad, kitchen six feet high, the bedroom without window, fireplace, 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 work-house for a confinement, and then came home. 3. Buckinghamshire. Thirty cosages, on one thousand acres of land, contained here about 130 to 140 persons. The parish of Bradenham comprises one thousand acres. It numbered in 1851 thirty-six houses and a population of eighty-four males and fifty-four females. This inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in 1861, when they numbered ninety-eight males and eighty-seven females, increased in ten years of fourteen men and thirty-three women. Meanwhile, the number of houses was one less. Winslow, great part of this newly-built in good style. Nemanthra houses appear very marked, since very miserable cots led at one shilling to one shilling three pence per week. Walter Eaton, here the landlords, in view of the increasing population, have destroyed about twenty percent of the existing houses. A poor labourer, who had to go about four 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. Tinkus End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were four adults and four children, eleven feet long, nine feet broad, six feet five inches high at its highest part, another eleven feet three inches by nine feet, five feet ten inches high, sheltered six persons. Each of these families had less space than is considered necessary for a conflict. No house had more than one bedroom, not one of them a back door. Walter had very scarce, weekly rent from one shilling four pence to two shillings, and sixteen of the houses visited, only one man that earned ten shillings a week. The quantity of air for each person, under the circumstances just described, corresponds to that which you would have if you were shut up in a box of four feet measuring each way the whole night. But then the ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional ventilation. Four, Cambridgeshire. Gamblingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the wretchedest cots to be found anywhere, much straw plating. A deadly lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth, rains 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 rockery too freely. The rents are very high. Eight or nine persons packed in one sleeping apartment, in two cases six adults, each with one or two children, in one small bedroom. Five, Essex. In this county, diminutions in the number of persons and of cottages go in many parishes hand in hand. In not less than twenty-two 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 Fingringo, 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 the circumstances. In 1851, 252 persons inhabited 61 houses. But in 1861, 262 persons were squeezed into 49 houses. In Basildon, 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 Fingringo, Southambridge, Whitford, Basildon, and Remsland-Cracks, 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. Six, Half-A-Chire. This little county has suffered more from the eviction spirit than any other in England. At Natby, overcrowded cottages, generally, with only two bedrooms, belonging for the most part to the farmers. They easily led them for three or four pounds a year, and paid a weekly wage of nine shillings. Seven, Huntington. 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. Fourteen cottages, each with one bedroom, were visited. In one, a married couple, three grown-up sons, one grown-up daughter, four children. In all ten, in another, three adults, six children. One of these rooms, in which eight 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 10 shillings or 12 shillings per root. These allotments are at a distance from the houses, which are without privies. The family, quote, must either go to the allotment to deposit their audios, end quote, or, as happens in this place, saving your presence, quote, use a closet with a trowel set like a drawer in a set of drawers, and drawn out weakly, and convey to the allotment to be emptied where its contents were wanted, end quote. In Japan, the circle of life conditions moves more decently than this. 8. Lincolnshire. Langtoft. A man lives here, and rides house, with his wife, her mother, and five 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 sugarloaf, dorma window opening in front. Why did he live here? On account of the garden? No, it is very small. Rent? High, one shilling thruppence per week. Near his work? No, six 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. A summary of the table. This table shows that a total number of persons in those 12 houses varies from 2 to 9 for one bedroom per house. End of table. 9. Kent. Kennington. Very seriously overpopulated in 1859, when Defterio 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 have been destroyed and no new ones built. In one district stood four houses, named bird cages. Each had four rooms of the following dimensions in feet and inches. Kitchen, 9 feet 5 by 8 feet 11 by 6 feet 6. Scullery, 8 feet 6 by 4 feet 6 by 6 feet 6. Bedroom, 8 feet 5 by 5 feet 10 by 6 feet 3. Bedroom, 8 feet 3 by 8 feet 4 by 6 feet 3. 10. Northamptonshire. Brunnerth, Pickford and Floor. In these villages, in the winter, two thousand and thirty 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 two or three. 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 overworked in summer and half-staffed in winter, it is no wonder if they say in their peculiar dialect, the parson and gentelfolk seem fit to death at them. At floor, instances, in one bedroom with the smallest size, of couples with four, five, six children, three adults with five children, a couple with grandfather and six children, down with scarlet fever, etc., in two houses with two bedrooms, two families of eight and nine adults respectively. 11. Wiltshire. Stratton. Thirty-one houses visited, eight with only one bedroom. Pental in the same parish. A cod-lead at one-chilling therpence weekly, with four adults and four children, had nothing good about it except the walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of stone to the roof of worn-out thatch. 12. Wusseshire. House destruction here not quite so excessive, yet from 1851 to 1861, the number of inhabitants to each house on the average has arisen from 4.2 to 4.6. Batsy. Many cots in little gardens here. Some of the farmers declare that the cots are great nuances here, because they bring the poor. On the statement of one gentleman, the poor are none the better for them. If you build five hundred, 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 law of nature, press on the means of housing. Dr. Hunter remarks, quote, Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as there is no particular attraction, such as doles, at Batsy, it must be repulsioned from some other unfit place, which will send them here. If each could find an allotment near his work, he would not prefer Batsy, where he pays for his scrap of ground twice as much as the farmer pays for his. End quote. The continual emigration to the towns, the continual formation of surplus population in the country, through the concentration of farms, conversion of arable land to pasture, machinery, etc., and the continual eviction of the agricultural population by the destruction of their cottages go hand in hand. The more empty the district is of man, 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 service 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 land proprietors and the farmers. Footnote. Quote, The heaven-born employment of the hind gives dignity even to his position. He is not a slave but a soldier of peace and deserves his place in married men's quarters to be provided by the landlord who has claimed the power of enforced labour similar to that which the country demands of the soldier. He no more receives market price for his work than does the soldier. Like the soldier, he is called 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. End quote. Dr. Hunter, Lococetato, page 132. Sometimes an exceptionally soft-hearted landlord relents at the solitude he has created. Quote. It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country, said Lord Lester, when complemented on the completion of Hookam. Quote. I look around and other houses to be seen but mine. I am the giant of giant castle and have eaten up all my neighbours. End quote. End footnote. 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 underpopulated. This is seen not only locally at the points where the efflux of men to towns, mines, railroad making, etc. is most marked. It is to be seen everywhere, in harvest time as well as in spring and summer, at those frequently recurring times when English agriculture so careful and intensive wants extra hands. There are always too many agricultural labours for the ordinary, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs of the cultivation of the soil. Footnote. A similar movement is seen during the last 10 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 Poileteria foncier, to which the system of parceling out the land has given rise, see, among others, the work of Collins, already quoted, and Karl Marx, the Arcinte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte. Second edition, Hamburg, 1869, pages 56, etc. In 1846, the town population in France was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58. In 1861, the town by 28.86, the agricultural by 71.14%. During the last five years, the diminution of the agricultural percentage of the population has been yet more marked. As early as 1846, Pierre Dupont in his ouvrier sang, And footnote. Quote, Footnote. The gang system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of Lincoln, Huntington, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk and Nottingham, here and there in the neighbouring counties of Northampton, Bedford and Rutland. Lincolnshire will serve as an example. A large part of this county is Newland, Marsh formerly, or even as in others of the eastern counties just named one lately from the sea. The steam engine has worked wonders in the way of drainage. What were once fents and sandbanks bear now a luxuriant sea of corn and the highest rents. The same thing holds of the alluvial lands, one by human endeavour, as in the island of Exholm and other perishes on the banks of the Trent. In proportion as the new farms arose, not only were known 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 to 1000 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 fenn farmer, for example, 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. End quote. Footnote. Children's Employment Commission, 6th Report. Evidence 173, page 37. End footnote. The soil requires much light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain processes of manuring, removing of stones, etc. This is done by the gangs, or organised bands that dwell in the open villages. The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both sexes, 13 to 18 years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated at the age of 13, and children of both sexes, 6 to 13 years of age. At the head is the gang master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is called a bad lot, escape grace, 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 a letter for peace-work, and his income, which on the average is not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer, 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. Footnote. Some gang masters, however, have worked themselves up to the position of farmers of 500 acres, over pride as of a whole rows of houses. End footnote. The farmers have discovered that women work steadily only under the direction of men, but that women and children once had going impetuously spent their life force, as Fourier knew, while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to economize his as much as he can. The gang master goes from one farm to another, and thus employs his gang from six to eight 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 landing out of these individually, independently of the gang, is his second trade. The drawbacks of the system are the overwork of the children and young persons, the enormous marches that they make daily, two and from the farms, five, six and sometimes seven miles distant. Finally, the demoralization 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 gypsy life under his direction. Coarse freedom and noisy jollity and obscene impudence give attractions to the gang. Generally, the gang master pays up in a public house, then he returns 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 Fuyé calls Phenerogamy 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 Gomorros, and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the kingdom, Fudnod. Quote, half the girls of Lötföd have been ruined by going out in gangs. End quote, Lococeteto, page 6, Pairware of 32, and Fudnod. 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 gypsy fund 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, clearly does not exist for the sake of the gang master, Fudnod. 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. End quote, Lococeteto, page 79, Pairware of 174, and Fudnod. It exists for the enrichment of the large farmers, and indirectly for the landlords, Fudnod. Quote, Small farmers never employ gangs, end quote. Quote, 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, end quote. Lococeteto, pages 17 and 14. To one of these gentlemen, the taste of his rent was so grateful, that he indignantly declared the commission of inquiry, 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. End footnote. 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, and of making adult male labour redundant. Footnote. Quote, Gang work is cheaper than other work, that is why they are employed, end quote. Says a former gang master, Lococeteto, page 17, paragraph 14. Quote, The gang system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and decidedly the worst for the children, end quote. Says a farmer, Lococeteto, page 16, paragraph 3, end footnote. From the exposition already made, it will be understood why on the one hand, a greater or less lack of employment for the agricultural labour 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. Footnote. Quote, Undoubtedly much of the work now done by children and gangs, used to be done by men and women. More men are out of work now, where children and women are employed than formerly, end quote, Lococeteto, page 43, paragraph 202. On the other hand, quote, The labour question in some agricultural districts, particularly the arable, is becoming so serious in consequence of emigration, and the facility afforded by railways, forgetting to large towns, that I, the I is the steward of a great Lord, think the services of children are most indispensable, end quote, Lococeteto, page 80, paragraph 180. For the labour question in English agricultural districts, differently from the rest of the civilised world, means the landlords and farmers question, that is, 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. End footnote. The cleanly weeded land, and the uncleanly human weeds of Lincolnshire, are pole and counter-pole of capitalistic production. Footnote. 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 Children's Employment Commission afforded the press sensational copy, always welcome, whilst the liberal press asked how the fine gentleman 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, and on 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 confines itself to reflections on the cause-decredition 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. Quote. 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 the employers, and the threats of being themselves discharged to be taken to work at an age when school attendance would be manifestly to their greater advantage. All that time and strength wasted, all the suffering from extra and unprofitable fatigue produced to the labourer and to his children. Every instance in which the parent may have traced the moral ruin of his child to the undermining of delicacy by the overcrowding 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. End quote. Locositeto. Page Roman numeral 20, paragraph 82, and Roman numeral 23, page 96. End footnote. End of part 7, chapter 25, section 5, part E. Chapter 25, section 5, part F, of capital volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume 1, by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Eveling and edited by Frederick Engels. Part 7, The Accumulation of Capital Chapter 25, the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Section 5, illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Part 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 head in 1841 reached 8,222,664. In 1851 it had dwindled to 6,623,985. In 1861 to 5,850,309. In 1866 to 5.5 millions, nearly to its level in 1801. The diminution began with the famine year, 1846, so that Ireland, in less than 20 years, lost more than five sixteenths of its people. Footnote. Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867 persons. 1811, 6,084,996. 1821, 6,869,544. 1831, 7,828,347. 1841, 8,222,664. And footnote. Its total emigration from May 1851 to July 1865 numbered 1,591,487. The emigration during the years 1861 to 1865 was more than half a million. The number of inhabited houses fell from 1851 to 1861 by 52,990. From 1851 to 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, that is, to their centralization. The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by decrease in the mass of products. For our purpose it suffices to consider the five years from 1861 to 1865 during which over half a million emigrated, and the absolute number of people sank by more than one third of a million. From the table and the text it results that there was an absolute decrease in horses of 71,944, an absolute decrease in cattle of 112,960, but an absolute increase in sheep of 146,662, and an absolute increase in pigs of 28,821. Footnote, the result would be found yet more unfavorable 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, and footnote. Let us now turn to agriculture, which yields the means of subsistence for cattle and for man. 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, beetroot, cabbages, carrots, parsnips, veggies, etc. A summary of the table, it shows an absolute decrease of the total cultivated land and an absolute decrease of cereal crop and green crop over the years, while the area covered with grass and clover and with flax is increased during those years. End of table. In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading grassland, 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 acres of which 480,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley, etc. 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 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 Scheduled D, profits with the exception of those of farmers, includes also the so-called professional profits, that is, the incomes of lawyers, doctors, etc. And the schedules C and E, in which no special details are given, include the incomes of employees, officers, state sinicurists, state fund holders, etc. Under Scheduled D, the average annual increase of income from 1853 to 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. England, a country with fully developed capitalist production and preeminently 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, 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. Footnote. 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. And footnote. Nevertheless, with the full 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 pastoral land, a larger part of the whole produce was transformed into surplus produce. The surplus produce increased, although the total produce of which it formed a fraction decreased. On the other hand, the money value of this surplus produce increased yet more rapidly than its mass, in consequence of the rise in the English market price of meat, wool, etc., during the last twenty, and especially during the last ten 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 formally 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 reestablished by depopulation. This is a far more important experiment than was the plague in the middle of the 14th century, so beloved of Malthusians. Note further, if only the naivete of the schoolmaster could apply to the conditions of production and population of the 19th century, the standard of the 14th, this naivete 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. Footnote, as Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the principle of population, Th. Settler, before the publication of his work on population, issued his famous book Ireland, Its Evils and Their Remedies. Second 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. And footnote, the Irish famine of 1846 killed more than one million people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage, the exodus of the next twenty years, an exodus still constantly increasing, did not, as, for example, the Thirty Years' War decimate, along with the human beings, their means of production. Irish genius discovered an altogether new way of spurting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United States, sent 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 that are replaced by the births, so that the absolute level of the population falls year by year. Footnote. Between 1851 and 1874 the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922. And footnote. What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed from the surplus population? That the relative surplus population is today as great as before 1846? That wages are just as low? That the oppression of the labourers has increased? That miseries 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 pastoral 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 the large number of acres that were formerly tilled lie idle or are turned permanently into grassland, the great part of the wasteland and peat bogs that were unused formally 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 out of 10th of the whole number. Footnote. According to a table in Murphy's Ireland industrial, political and social, 1870, 94.6% of the holdings do not reach 100 acres. 5.4 exceed 100 acres. End. Footnote. 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 furnished new recruits to the class of wage labourers. The one great industry of Ireland, linen manufacture, requires relatively few adult men and only applies altogether in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton rose in 1861 to 1866, a comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like all other great modern industries, it constantly produces, by incessant fluctuations, a relative surplus population within its own sphere, even with an absolute increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it. The misery of the agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic, assured 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 overwork 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 pounds 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. Footnote, 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, and footnote. 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 twenty years risen 50-60%, and stands now, on the average, at six shillings to nine shillings per week. But behind this apparent rise is hidden an actual fall in wages, for it does not correspond at all to the rise in price of the necessary means of subsistence that has taken place in the meantime. For proof, the following extract from the official accounts of an Irish workhouse, average weekly cost per head, year ended 29th September, 1849, provisions and necessaries, one shilling, three and a quarter pence, clothing, three pence, total, one shilling, six and a quarter pence. 29th September, 1869, provisions and necessaries, two shillings, seven and a quarter pence, clothing, six pence, total, three shillings, one and a quarter pence. The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore fully twice, and that of clothing exactly twice, as much as they were twenty 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 miles of agricultural wages were paid in kind, only the smallest part of money. Today payment in money is the rule. From this it follows that whatever the amount of the real wage, its money rate must rise. Quote, Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin, with a root, 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. End quote. Footnote? Lococeteto. Pages 29 and 1. End footnote. In fact, formerly the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the small farmers, and formed for the most part a kind of rearguard 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, dwell still on the holdings of the farmers in overcrowded huts whose hideousness far surprises the worst that the English agricultural labourers offered us in this way, and this holds generally with the exception of certain tracts of Ulster, in the south, in the counties of Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, etc., in the east, in Wicklow, Wexford, etc., in the centre of Ireland, in Kings and Queens County, Dublin, etc., in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Golay, etc. Quote, the agricultural labourers, huts, and inspector cries out our disgrace to the Christianity and to the civilisation of his country, end quote, footnote, loco citato page 12, end footnote. In order to increase the attractions of these holes for the labourers, the pieces of land belonging there too from time immemorial are systematically confiscated. Quote, 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 prescribed race. End quote, footnote, loco citato page 12, end footnote. Quote, the first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts situated in 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 refuge into garrets, holes, cellars and corners in the worst black 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, quote, 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, end quote, footnote, loco citato page 25, end footnote. Quote, the towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed to be the surplus labour of the rural division, 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. The truth is that this want only becomes perceptible in harvest time or during spring at such times as agricultural operations are carried on with activity, and of the periods of the year many hands are idle. That, from the digging out of the main crop of potatoes in October until the early spring following, there is no employment for them, and further that during the active times they are subject to broken days and to all kinds of interruptions. End quote, footnote, loco citato pages 1, 25, 27, 31 and 32, end footnote. These results of the agricultural revolution, that is, the change of arable into pastoral land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous economy of labour, etc., are still further aggravated by the model landlords who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, can descend to live in Ireland on their domains. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be broken, these gentlemen draw their, quote, 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, end quote, footnote, loco citato page 30, end footnote. 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, quote, though living with a 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 provisions they are subjected to, has made this class particularly susceptible to low fever and pulmonary consumption, end quote, footnote, logo citato pages 21 and 13, end footnote. After this it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of the inspectors, a somber 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 cocaine, into which the great Mathusian panacea, the population, has transformed green air in. 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 gave his evidence verbatim, as I took it from his mouth, that he was a skilled factory hand, maybe understood when I say that he was employed on goods for the Manchester market. Johnson. I am a beatler, and work from six in the morning till eleven at night, from Monday to Friday. Saturday we leave off at six p.m., and get three hours of it, for meals and rest. I have five children in all. For this work I get tensioning sixpence a week. My wife works here also, and gets five shillings a week. The oldest girl, whose twelve, 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 twelve takes care of the little children all the day, and we get nothing till breakfast at eight. At eight we go home. We get tea once a week. At other times we get stir-about, sometimes of oatmeal, 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 stir-about. Sometimes we get a little milk as it may be. So we go on from day to day, Sunday and weekday, 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 one pence a week ahead. Our rent is nine shillings week. Pete for firing costs one shilling six pence a fortnight at the very lowest. End quote. Footnote. Report of inspectors of factories, 31st October 1866, page 96, end footnote. 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 solchen großen Herrn. From table E we saw that during 1864 of 4,368,610 pounds sterling of total profits, three surplus value makers pocketed only 262,819 pounds sterling, that in 1865, however, out of 4,669,979 pounds sterling total profits, the same three virtuosi of abstinence pocketed 274,528 pounds sterling. In 1864, 26 surplus value makers reached to 646,377 pounds sterling. In 1865, 28 surplus value makers reached to 736,448 pounds sterling. In 1864, 121 surplus value makers, 1,076,912 pounds sterling. In 1865, 150 surplus value makers, 1,320,906 pounds sterling. In 1864, 1,131 surplus value makers, 2,150,818 pounds sterlings, nearly half of the total annual profit. In 1865, 1,194 surplus value makers, 2,418,833 pounds sterling, more than half of the total annual profit. But the lion's share, which an inconceivably small number of land magnets 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 magnets. 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 two facts. The fact is that, as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish rent rolls swell. That deep population 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 overpopulated, 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 laboring 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 bloodletting of one third of a million only, instead of about two millions. In fact, without the getting rid of these, the millennium in Ireland is not to be. The proof is easily given. Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally farms of the first three categories, under one and not over fifteen acres. These, above all, must disappear. This gives 307,058 supernumerary farmers, and reckoning the families the low average of four persons, one million, 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 four, five, six, of over fifteen, and not over one hundred 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 et mangeant, Randroll's eyes will soon discover that Ireland, with three and a half millions, is still always miserable, and miserable because she is overpopulated. Therefore, her depopulation must go yet further, that thus she may fulfil her true destiny, that of an English sheep walk and cattle pasture. Footnote. How the famine and its consequences have been deliberately made the most of, both by the individual landlords and by the English legislator, to forcibly carry out the agricultural revolution and to thin the population of Ireland down to the proportioned satisfactory to the landlords, I shall show more fully in volume three of this work, in the section on land and property. There also I return to the condition of the small farmers and the agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau W. Sr. says, with other things, in his posthumous work, journals, conversations, and essays related to Ireland, two volumes, London 1868, volume two, page 282, quote, 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, where 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 pastoral 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. Michel-Léon de Lavagne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of the channel. It takes a serious man, à la Lavagne, to be caught by such childishness. 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 queues pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, reappears on the other side of the ocean, as Athenian, and face to face with the old queen of the seas rises, threatening and more threatening the young, giant republic. A Serba Feta-Romanus agent, Scalesqua Fraterni-Nesis. End of Part 7, Chapter 25, Section 5, Part F. Chapter 26 of Capital Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1 by Karl Marx, translated from the 3rd German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Averling, and edited by Frederick Engels. Part 8, The so-called Primitive Accumulation, Chapter 26, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation. We have seen how money is changed into capital, how through capital surplus value is made, and from surplus value more capital. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus value. Surplus value presupposes capitalistic production. Capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation, previous accumulation of Adam Smith, preceding capitalistic accumulation, an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point. This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people, one the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite, the other lazy rascals spending their substance and more in riotous living. Legend of theological original sin tells us, certainly, how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow. But the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind. Thus it came to pass that the former sword accumulated wealth, and the latter sword had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. Emptier, for example, had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so spirituelle. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and labour were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always accepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic. In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place on the certain circumstances that centre in this, that is, that two very different kinds of commodity possessors must come face to face and into contact. On the one hand, the owners of money means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess by buying other people's labour power. On the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc., nor do the means of production belong to them as in the case of peasant proprietors. They are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production, a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it. The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The resolution of the latter set free the elements of the former. The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage workers appears, on the one hand, at their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they have been robbed of all their own means of production and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. The chevalier de l'industrie, however, only succeeded in supplanting the chevalier of the sword by making use of events of which they themselves were wholly innocent. They have risen by means as vile as those by which the Roman freedmen, once on a time, made himself the master of his patronus. The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage laborer as well as to the capitalist was the servitude of the laborer. The advance consisted in a change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To understand its march, we need not go back very far. Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the abolition of servdom has been long affected, and the highest development of the Middle Ages, the existence of sovereign towns, has been long on the wane. In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation. But, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled as free and so-called unattached proletarians on the labor market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer of the peasant from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation in different countries assumes different aspects and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form. Footnote In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest, the dissolution of servdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. The serve was emancipated in that country before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed him into a free proletarian, who, moreover, found his master ready waiting for him in the towns for the most part handed down as legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the world marked about the end of the 15th century annihilated Northern Italy's commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The laborers of the towns were driven en masse into the country and gave an impulse, never before seen, to the petit couture carried on in the form of gardening. And footnote. End of Part 8, Chapter 26