The Condition of the Working Class in England
Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England
Preface to the English Edition
The book, an English translation of which is here republished,
was first issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young,
twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with
its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. It was
translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F. Kelley
Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York. The American
edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been extensively
circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present English copyright edition
is brought out with the full consent of all parties interested.
For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in
English by the author. The first had little to do
discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is, therefore,
here o the second & the original preface & is
largely made use of in the present introductory remarks.
The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects,
to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our
recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the
larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can
it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its
early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the
representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that
serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he
finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or B
and, again, the commission agent who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or
Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds
out that in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop
those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are
considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those
tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where
a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a
means of saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the relation between
the manufacturer and his &hands.&
The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new
industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws[1] and the financial reforms subsequent thereon gave to
English industry and commerce all the elbow-room they had asked for. The
discovery of the Californian and Australian gold-fields followed in rapid
succession. The colonial markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity
for absorbing English manufactured goods. In India millions of hand-weavers
were finally crushed out by the Lancashire power-loom. China was more and more
being opened up. Above all, the United States & then, commercially
speaking, a mere colonial market, but by far the biggest of them all &
underwent an economic development astounding even for that rapidly progressive
country. And, finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close
of the preceding period & railways and ocean steamers & were now
worked out on an they realised actually what had hitherto
existed only potentially, a world-market. This world-market, at first, was
composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped
around one manufacturing centre & England which consumed the greater part
of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with the greater part
of their requirements in manufactured articles. No wonder England&s
industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled, and such that the status of
1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive and insignificant. And in
proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did
manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. The competition of
manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople
did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low m they were
not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely
to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny
wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours&
was enacted, and a number
of other secondary reforms introduced & much against the spirit of Free
Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the
giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover,
the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss
and inconvenience caused by every conflict be and thus a
new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them
to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of
Trades& Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes & at
opportune times & a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest
manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were
now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The
fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing
else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the
few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all
importance and had bec and to crush all the quicker and
all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet
without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of
the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed & at least in the leading
industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the
case & to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the
workman&s fate during its earlier stages. And thus it renders more and
more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition
of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in
the capitalistic system itself. The wage-worker sells to the capitalist
his labour-power for a certain daily sum. After a few hours& work he has
reproduced t but the substance of his contract is, that he
has to work another series of hours to complete his working- and the value
he produces during these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value,
which costs the capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. That is the
basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society
into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of
production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of
wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour-power, on the other. And
that this result is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance, but by the
system itself & this fact has been brought out in bold relief by the
development of Capitalism in England since 1847.
Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other
epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation
in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling
victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this
book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has
been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of
the worst &slums& I had to describe. &Little Ireland&
had disappeared, and the
&Seven Dials&
next on the list for sweeping away. But what of that? Whole districts which in
1844 I could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns,
fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery. Only the
pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made
further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working-class. But
that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place
is amply proved by the Report of the Royal Commission &on the Housing of
the Poor,& 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects. Police
regulations have been plent but they can only hedge in the
distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.
But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist
exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it.
France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors who, at
this moment & as foreseen by me in 1844 & are more and more
breaking up England&s industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young
as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than
and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the
same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844. With regard to
America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True, the external surroundings
in which the working-class is placed in America are very different, but the
same economical laws are at work, and the results, if not identical in every
respect, must still be of the same order. Hence we find in America the same
struggles for a shorter working-day, for a legal limitation of the
working-time, especially of women and c we find the
truck-system in full blossom, and the cottage-system, in rural districts, made
use of by the &bosses& as a means of domination over the workers.
When I received, in 1886, the American papers with accounts of the great strike
of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but
to read my own description of the North of England colliers& strike of
1844. The same cheating of the workpeo the same
truck-system the same attempt to break the miners& resistance by the
capitalists& last, but crushing, resource, & the eviction of the
men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.
I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, or
to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since 1844. And
for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the book must be
and, secondly, the first volume of &Das Kapital,& by
Karl Marx, an English translation of which is before the public, contains a
very ample description of the state of the British working-class, as it was
about 1865, that is to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity
reached its culminating point. I should, then, have been obliged again to go
over the ground already covered by Marx&s celebrated work.
It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical
standpoint of this book & philosophical, economical, political &
does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international
Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively
through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My, book represents
one of the phases of its e and as the human embryo, in its
early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish-ancestors, so this
book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of Modern Socialism from one
of its ancestors, German philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum
that Communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory
compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist
class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract,
but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the
wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but
strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working-class, so long the
social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working-class
alone. The French bourgeois of 1789, too, declared the emancipation of the
bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of
but the nobility
and cle the proposition & though for the time being,
with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth & soon became a
mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the
revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the
&impartiality& of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers
a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and
tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending
classes & these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a
great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers & wolves in
sheep&s clothing.
The recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text as
five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events
from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that
the real period that the intermediate revulsions were
secondary, and tended more and more to disappear. Since 1868 the state of
things has changed again, of which more anon.
I have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst
others that of an imminent social revolution in England, which my youthful
ardour induced me to venture upon. The wonder is, not that a good many of them
proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and that the critical
state of English trade, to be brought on by Continental and especially American
competition, which I then foresaw & though in too short a period &
has now actually come to pass. In this respect I can, and am bound to, bring
the book up to date, by placing here an article which I published in the London
Commonweal of March 1, 1885, under the heading: &England in 1845
and in 1885& It gives at the same time a short outline of the history of
the English working-class during these forty years, and is as follows:
&Forty years ago England stood face to face with a
crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only. The immense and rapid
development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets
and the increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently
interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a long period of
chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending in
feverish over-production and consequent renewed collapse. The capitalist class
clamoured for Free Trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the
starving population of the towns back to the country districts whence they
came, to invade them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread,
but as an army quartered upon the enemy. The working masses of the towns
demanded their share of political power & the People&s C
they were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only
difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried by
physical or by moral force. Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the
Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution.
&The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English
middle-class. The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen
frightened the small middle-class of England and disorganised the narrower, but
more matter-of-fact movement of the English working-class. At the very moment
when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed
internally before even it collapsed externally on the 10th of April, 1848 . The action of the working-class was
thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole
&The Reform Bill of 1831[6] had been the victory of the whole capitalist class
over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the
manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those
sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with
the landed interest & bankers, stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc. Free
Trade meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and
financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the
manufacturing capitalists & the class which now represented the nation.
And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial
production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation
were revolutionised. Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end
of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all
raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working- the
reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down & if not as
yet the bringing down of wages. England was to become the
&workshop of the world'; all other countries were to become for England
what Ireland already was & markets for her manufactured goods, supplying
her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing
centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and
cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a
glorious prospect!
&The manufacturing capitalists set about the
realisation of this their great object with that strong common sense and that
contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from
their more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent.. Chartism was dying out.
The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had
spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these
circumstances had turned the English working-class, politically, into the tail
of the &great Liberal Party,& the party led by the manufacturers.
This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing
capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the
transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt,
and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full
social and political power over the nation except by the help of the
working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both
classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only
willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all
trades was tolerated. Trades& Unions, hitherto considered inventions of
the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate
institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines
amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious
up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful,
especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the
legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage
with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. And,
practically, that horrid &People&s Charter& actually became
the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the
last. &The Abolition of the Property Qualification& and &Vote
by Ballot& are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and
1884 make a near approach to
&universal suffrage,& at least such as it now exists in G
the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates &equal electoral
districts& & on the whole not more unequal than those of G
&payment of members,& and shorter, if not actually &annual
Parliaments,& are visibly looming in the distance & and yet there
are people who say that Chartism is dead.
&The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its
predecessors, has had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who
put it down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary executors.
Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismarck had to
revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian independence, and the English
manufacturers had to enact the People&s Charter.
&For England, the effects of this domination of the
manufacturing capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended
to a degree unheard of even in this cradl the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared with
the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, with the
overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands
of capitalists and of human working power concentrated in the large towns. The
progress was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in
1857 as well as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural,
inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which always
set themselves right in the end.
&And the condition of the working-class during this
period? There was temporary improvement even for the great mass. But this
improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body
of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of hands by new
machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more
and more superseded by machines.
&A permanent improvement can be recognised for two
&protected& sections only of the working-class. Firstly, the
factory hands. The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within
relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed
them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. They are
undoubtedly better off than before 1848. The best proof is that, out of ten
strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own
interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You can never
get the masters to agree to work &short time,& let manufactured
goods b but get the work-people to strike, and the masters
shut their factories to a man.
&Secondly, the great Trades& Unions. They are
the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men
predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of
women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised
strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers, are each
of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and
bricklayers& labourers, they can even successfully resist the
introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since
1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for
more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they
with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy
among the working- they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a
relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the
model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice
people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular
and for the whole capitalist class in general.
&But as to the great mass of working-people, the state
of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not
lower. The East End of London is an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and
moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns & abstraction made
of the privileged min and so in the smaller towns and in
the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the value of
labour-power to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other
law which reduces its average price, as a rule, to the minimum of
those means of subsistence, these laws act upon them with the irresistible
force of an automatic engine which crushes them between its wheels.
&This, then, was the position created by the Free
Trade policy of 1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing
capitalists. But then a change came. The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by
a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not,
indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878;
but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant
branches of industry. Neither will nor will the period of
longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A
dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we
have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?
&The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption:
that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural
world. And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure
delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be
established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. And other countries
besides England & France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia &
have coals. And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned
into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English
capitalists. They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves,
but for t and the consequence is that the manufacturing
monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up.
&But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the
pivot of the present social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted,
the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of English
the decennial crises were the consequence. And new markets are
getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the Negroes of the Congo are
now to be forced into the civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicos,
Staffordshire pottery, and Birmingham hardware. How will it be when
Continental, and especially American, goods flow in in ever-increasing
quantities & when the predominating share, still held by British
manufacturers, will become reduced from year to year? Answer, Free Trade, thou
universal panacea.
&I am not the first to point this out. Already in
1883, at the Southport meeting of the British Association,[8] Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President of the Economic
section, stated plainly that &the days of great trade profits in England
were over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of
industrial labour. The country might almost be said to be entering the
non-progressive state.&
&But what is to be the consequence?
Capitalist production cannot stop. It must go on increasing and
expanding, or it must die. Even now the mere reduction of England&s
lion&s share in the supply of the world&s markets means stagnation,
distress, excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workpeople there. What
will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete
&Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles,
for capitalistic production. Its very basis is the necessity of constant
expansion, and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. It ends in a
deadlock. Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the question:
either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist production must. Which is
&And the working-class? If even under the unparalleled
commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1868, they have had to
if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best
but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged,
&protected& minority was permanently benefited, what will it be
when this dazzling period is brough when the present
dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its intensified
condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of English trade?
&The truth is this: during the period of
England&s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a
certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were
very unequally parcel the privileged minority pocketed
most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then.
And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no
Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English
working-class will lose that it will find itself generally
& the privileged and leading minority not excepted on a level with its
fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again
in England.&
To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me In 1885, I have
but little to add. Needless to say that to-day there is indeed &Socialism
again in England,& and plenty of it & Socialism & Socialism
of all shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and
poetic, Socialism of the working-class and of the middle-class, for, verily,
that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable,
but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room
causeuses. That shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot
of &society,& middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies
the contempt in which we Socialists of a past generation always held that
public opinion. At the same time we have no reason to grumble at the symptom
What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among
bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than
the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally, that is the
revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer
the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair,
has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the &New
Unionism,& that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of
&unskilled& workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt
the form of the old Unions of &skilled& workers but it is
essentially different in character. The old Unions preserve the traditions of
the time when they were, founded, and look upon the wages system as a
once-for-all established, final fact, which they at best can modify in the
interest of their members. The new Unions were founded at a time when the faith
in the eternity of the wages system their founders and
promoters were Socialists either consc the masses, whose
adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the
working- but they had this immense advantage, that their
minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited
&respectable& bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the
better situated &old& Unionists. And thus we see now these new
Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and
more taking in tow the rich and proud &old& Unions.
Undoubtedly, the East Enders have committ so have their
predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire Socialists who pooh-pooh them. A large
class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker than by undergoing
the consequences of its own mistakes. And for all the faults committed in past,
present and future, the revival of the East End of London remains one of the
greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de siècle, and glad and
proud I am to have lived to see it.[9]
&Since I wrote the above, six months ago, the English
working-class movement has again made a big step forward. The parliamentary
elections which took place the other day have given formal notice to both
official parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, that both of them would
thereafter have to reckon with a third party, the workers& party. This
workers& party is on its elements are still occupied
with casting off traditional prejudices of every sort & bourgeois, old
trade-unionist and even doctrinaire-socialist & so that they may finally
be able to get together on a basis common to all of them. And yet the instinct
to unite which they followed was already so great that it produced election
results hitherto unheard-of in England. In London two workers stood for
election, and openly as S the Liberals did not dare to put up
their own men against them and the two Socialists won by overwhelming and
unexpected majorities. In Middlesbrough a workers& candidate contested a
seat with a Liberal and a Conservative and was elected I on
the other hand, the new workers& candidates who bad made compacts with
the Liberals failed hopelessly of election, with the exception of a single one.
Among the former so-called workers& representatives, that is, those
people who are forgiven their being members of the working-class because they
themselves would like to drawn their quality of being workers in the ocean of
their liberalism, Henry Broadhurst, the most important representative of the
old unionism, was completely snowed under because he came out against the
eight-hour day. In two Glasgow, one Salford and several other constituencies,
independent workers& candidates ran against candidates of both the old
parties. They were beaten, but so were the Liberal candidates. In short, in a
number of big city and industrial election districts the workers have
definitely severed all ties with the two old parties and thus achieved direct
or indirect successes, beyond anything witnessed in any previous election. And
boundless is the joy thereof among the working people. For the first time they
have seen and felt what they can achieve by using their suffrage in the
interest of their class. The spell which the superstitious belief in the
&great Liberal Party& cast over the English workers for almost 40
years is broken. They have seen by dint of striking examples that they, the
workers, are the decisive power in England if they only want to and know what
and the elections of 1892 marked the beginning of such knowing and
wanting. The Continental workers& movement will take care of the rest. By
their further successes the Germans and the French, who are already so
numerously represented in their Parliaments and local councils, will keep the
spirit of emulation of the English going at a quite adequate pace. And if in
the not very distant future it appears that this new Parliament cannot get
anywhere with Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Gladstone cannot get anywhere with this
Parliament, the English workers& party will surely be sufficiently
constituted to put an early end to the seesaw of the two old parties, who have
been succeeding each other in office and by this very means perpetuating the
rule of the bourgeoisie.&}