Das Kapital

THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Twenty-Five
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
Contents
Section 1 - The Increased Demand for labour
power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the
same
Section 2 - Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital
Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that
Accompanies it
Section 3 - Progressive Production of a Relative surplus
population or Industrial Reserve Army
Section 4 - Different Forms of the Relative surplus population.
The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation
Section 5 - Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation
A. England from 1846-1866
B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class
C. The Nomad Population
D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working
class
E. The British Agricultural Proletariat
F. Ireland
Section 1.
The Increased Demand for labour power that Accompanies Accumulation, the
Composition of Capital Remaining the Same
In this chapter we consider the influence of the growth of capital on the
lot of the labouring class. The most important factor in this inquiry is the
composition of capital and the changes it undergoes in the course of the
process of accumulation.
The composition of capital is to be understood in a two-fold sense. On the
side of value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into
constant capital or value of the means of production, and variable capital or
value of labour power, the sum total of wages. On the side of material, as it
functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of
production and living labour power. This latter composition is determined by
the relation between the mass of the means of production employed, on the one
hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I
call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical
composition of capital.
Between the two there is a strict correlation. To express this, I call the
value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical
composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic
composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital,
without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.
The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production
have, one with another, more or less different compositions. The average of
their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total
capital in this branch of production. Lastly, the average of these averages, in
all branches of production, gives us the composition of the total social
capital of a country, and with this alone are we, in the last resort, concerned
in the following investigation.
Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part
invested in labour power. A part of the surplus-value turned into additional
capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional
labour fund. If we suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same,
the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e., that a
definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour
power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour and the subsistence-fund
of the labourers clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and
the more rapidly, the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital
produces yearly a surplus-value, of which one part is yearly added to the
original capital; since this increment itself grows yearly along with the
augmentation of the capital already functioning; since lastly, under special
stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening of new markets, or of new spheres
for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social wants,
&c., the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended, merely by a change
in the division of the surplus-value or surplus-product into capital and
revenue, the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the increase of
labour power or of the number of labourers; the demand for labourers may exceed
the supply, and, therefore, wages may rise. This must, indeed, ultimately be
the case if the conditions supposed above continue. For since in each year more
labourers are employed than in its predecessor, sooner or later a point must be
reached, at which the requirements of accumulation begin to surpass the
customary supply of labour, and, therefore, a rise of wages takes place. A
lamentation on this score was heard in England during the whole of the
fifteenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. The more or less
favourable circumstances in which the wage working class supports and
multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist
production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the
capital relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one
hand, and wage workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale,
i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital relation on a progressive
scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage workers
at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly
re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion;
which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only
concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself,
this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the
reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase
of the proletariat.
Classical economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo,
&c., as mentioned earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the
consumption, by the productive labourers, of all the capitalised part of the
surplus-product, or with its transformation into additional wage labourers. As
early as 1696 John Bellers says:
“For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as
many pounds in money, and as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the
rich man be, but a labourer? And as the labourers make men rich, so the more
labourers there will be, the more rich men ... the labour of the poor being the
mines of the rich.”
So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century:
“It would be easier, where property is well secured, to
live without money than without poor; for who would do the work? ... As they
[the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth
saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and
pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in,
nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every
person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the
interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost
never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get.... Those that get their
living by their daily labour ... have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable
but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only
thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate
quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either
dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy....
From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves
are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious
poor; for besides, that they are the never-failing nursery of fleets and
armies, without them there could be no enjoyment,
and no product of any country could be valuable. “To make the
society” [which of course consists of non-workers] “happy and
people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great
numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and
multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily
his necessities may be supplied.”
What Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man, had not yet seen, is that the
mechanism of the process of accumulation itself increases, along with the
capital, the mass of “labouring poor,” i.e., the wage
labourers, who turn their labour power into an increasing power of
self-expansion of the growing capital, and even by doing so must eternise their
dependent relation on their own product, as personified in the capitalists. In
reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden in his “The
State of the Poor, an History of the Labouring Classes in England,” says,
“the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully
adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in
consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the
society must be indefatigably employed .... There are others who, though they
‘neither toil nor spin,’ can yet command the produce of industry,
but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation and order ....
They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions, which have recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means
besides the exertion of labour.... Persons of independent fortune ... owe their
superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but
almost entirely ... to the industry of others. It is not the possession of
land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent
from the labouring part of the community .... This [scheme approved by Eden]
would give the people of property sufficient (but by no means too much)
influence and authority over those who ... work for them; and it would place
such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of
easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will
allow to be necessary for their own comfort.”
Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam
Smith during the eighteenth century that produced any work of importance.
Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which
conditions are those most favourable to the labourers, their relation of
dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable or, as Eden says: “easy
and liberal.” Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of
capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive,
i.e., the sphere of capital’s exploitation and rule merely
extends with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A larger part
of their own surplus-product, always increasing and continually transformed
into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment,
so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments; can make some additions
to their consumption-fund of clothes, furniture, &c., and can lay by small
reserve funds of money. But just as little as better clothing, food, and
treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave,
so little do they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in the price of
labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that
the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged
for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. In the
controversies on this subject the chief fact has generally been overlooked,
viz., the differentia specifica
{defining characteristic} of capitalistic production. Labour power
is sold today, not with a view of satisfying, by its service or by its product,
the personal needs of the buyer. His aim is augmentation of
his capital, production of commodities containing more labour than he pays for,
containing therefore a portion of value that costs him nothing, and that is
nevertheless realised when the commodities are sold. Production of
surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour power is
only saleable so far as it preserves the means of production in their capacity
of capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a
source of additional capital.
The conditions of its sale, whether more or less favourable to the labourer,
include therefore the necessity of its constant re-selling, and the constantly
extended reproduction of all wealth in the shape of capital. Wages, as we have
seen, by their very nature, always imply the performance of a certain quantity
of unpaid labour on the part of the labourer. Altogether, irrespective of the
case of a rise of wages with a falling price of labour, &c., such an
increase only means at best a quantitative diminution of the unpaid labour that
the worker has to supply. This diminution can never reach the point at which it
would threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts as to the rate
of wages (and Adam Smith has already shown that in such a conflict, taken on
the whole, the master is always master), a rise in the price of labour
resulting from accumulation of capital implies the following alternative:
Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not
interfere with the progress of accumulation. In this there is nothing
wonderful, for, says Adam Smith, “after these (profits) are diminished,
stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than
before.... A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster
than a small stock with great profits.” (l. c., ii, p. 189.) In this case
it is evident that a diminution in the unpaid labour in no way interferes with
the extension of the domain of capital. — Or, on the other hand,
accumulation slackens in consequence of the rise in the price of labour,
because the stimulus of gain is blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens; but
with its lessening, the primary cause of that lessening vanishes,
i.e., the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour power.
The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the
very obstacles that it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to
a level corresponding with the needs of the self-expansion of capital, whether
the level be below, the same as, or above the one which was normal before the
rise of wages took place. We see thus: In the first case, it is not the
diminished rate either of the absolute, or of the proportional, increase in
labour power, or labouring population, which causes capital to be in excess,
but conversely the excess of capital that makes exploitable labour power
insufficient. In the second case, it is not the increased rate either of the
absolute, or of the proportional, increase in labour power, or labouring
population, that makes capital insufficient; but, conversely, the relative
diminution of capital that causes the exploitable labour power, or rather its
price, to be in excess. It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of
capital which are reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable
labour power, and therefore seem produced by the latter’s own independent
movement. To put it mathematically: the rate
of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent, variable; the rate of
wages, the dependent, not the independent, variable. Thus, when the industrial
cycle is in the phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities is
expressed as a rise in the value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a
general rise in the price of commodities, as a fall in the value of money. The
so-called currency school concludes from this that with high prices too much,
with low prices too little money
is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of facts are worthily paralleled by the
economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that
there are now too few, now too many wage labourers.
The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of the pretended
“natural law of population,” reduces itself simply to this: The
correlation between accumulation of capital and rate of wages is nothing else
than the correlation between the unpaid labour transformed into capital, and
the additional paid labour necessary for the setting in motion of this
additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two
magnitudes, independent one of the other: on the one hand, the magnitude of the
capital; on the other, the number of the labouring population; it is rather, at
bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same
labouring population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working
class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its
conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then
wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid
labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the
point at which the surplus labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied
in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is
capitalised, accumulation lags, and the movement of rise in wages receives a
check. The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only
leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its
reproduction on a progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation,
metamorphosed by economists into pretended law of Nature, in
reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every
diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price
of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an
ever-enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation. It cannot be otherwise in a
mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of
self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth
existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer. As,
in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in
capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.
Section 2.
Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the
Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that Accompanies it
According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of
social wealth, nor the magnitude of the capital already functioning, that lead
to a rise of wages, but only the constant growth of accumulation and the degree
of rapidity of that growth. (Adam Smith, Book I., chapter 8.) So far, we have
only considered one special phase of this process, that in which the increase
of capital occurs along with a constant technical composition of capital. But
the process goes beyond this phase.
Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system, then, in the course
of accumulation, a point is reached at which the development of the
productivity of social labour becomes the most powerful lever of
accumulation.
“The same cause,” says Adam Smith, “which
raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its
productive powers, and to make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater
quantity of work.”
Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil, &c., and
from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown rather
qualitatively in the goodness than quantitatively in the mass of their
products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a given society, is
expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one labourer,
during a given time, with the same tension of labour power, turns into
products. The mass of the means of production which he thus transforms,
increases with the productiveness of his labour. But those means of production
play a double part. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others a
condition of the increasing productivity of labour. E.g., with the
division of labour in manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw
material is worked up in the same time, and, therefore, a greater mass of raw
material and auxiliary substances enter into the labour process. That is the
consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the
mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drain-pipes, &c., is
a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. So also is it with the
means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport,
&c. But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means
of production, as compared with the labour power incorporated with them, is an
expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter
appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to
the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the
subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor.
This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass
of means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour power that
vivifies them, is reflected again in its value composition, by the increase of
the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent.
There may be, e.g., originally 50 per cent. of a capital laid out in
means of production, and 50 per cent. in labour power; later on, with the
development of the productivity of labour, 80 per cent. in means of production,
20 per cent. in labour power, and so on. This law of the progressive increase
in constant capital, in proportion to the variable, is confirmed at every step
(as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities,
whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same
epoch. The relative magnitude of the element of price, which represents the
value of the means of production only, or the constant part of capital
consumed, is in direct, the relative magnitude of the other element of price
that pays labour (the variable part of capital) is in inverse proportion to the
advance of accumulation.
This diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the
constant, or the altered value-composition of the capital, however, only shows
approximately the change in the composition of its material constituents. If,
e.g., the capital-value employed today in spinning is 7/8 constant and
1/8 variable, whilst at the beginning of the 18th century it was ½ constant and
½ variable, on the other hand, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour,
&c., that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively
today, is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the 18th century.
The reason is simply that, with the increasing productivity of labour, not only
does the mass of the means of production consumed by it increase, but their
value compared with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises
absolutely, but not in proportion to their mass. The increase of the difference
between constant and variable capital, is, therefore, much less than that of
the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the
constant, and the mass of the labour power into which the variable, capital is
converted. The former difference increases with the latter, but in a smaller
degree.
But, if the progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the
variable part of capital, it by no means, in doing this, excludes the
possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose that a capital-value
at first is divided into 50 per cent. of constant and 50 per cent. of variable
capital; later into 80 per cent. of constant and 20 per cent. of variable. If
in the meantime the original capital, say £6,000, has increased to £18,000, its
variable constituent has also increased. It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But
where as formerly an increase of capital by 20 per cent. would have sufficed to
raise the demand for labour 20 per cent., now this latter rise requires a
tripling of the original capital.
In Part IV, it was shown, how the development of the productiveness of
social labour presupposes co-operation on a large scale; how it is only upon
this supposition that division and combination of labour can be organised, and
the means of production economised by concentration on a vast scale; how
instruments of labour which, from their very nature, are only fit for use in
common, such as a system of machinery, can be called into being; how huge
natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the
transformation can be effected of the process of production into a
technological application of science. On the basis of the production of
commodities, where the means of production are the property of private persons,
and where the artisan therefore either produces commodities, isolated from and
independent of others, or sells his labour power as a commodity, because he
lacks the means for independent industry, co-operation on a large scale can
realise itself only in the increase of individual capitals, only in proportion
as the means of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed
into the private property of capitalists. The basis of the production of
commodities can admit of production on a large scale in the capitalistic form
alone. A certain accumulation of capital, in the hands of individual producers
of commodities, forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the specifically
capitalistic mode of production. We had, therefore, to assume that this occurs
during the transition from handicraft to capitalistic industry. It may be
called primitive accumulation, because it is the historic basis, instead of the
historic result of specifically capitalist production. How it itself
originates, we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough that it forms the
starting point. But all methods for raising the social productive power of
labour that are developed on this basis, are at the same time methods for the
increased production of surplus-value or surplus-product, which in its turn is
the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, at the same time
methods of the production of capital by capital, or methods of its accelerated
accumulation. The continual re-transformation of surplus-value into capital now
appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters
into the process of production. This in turn is the basis of an extended scale
of production, of the methods for raising the productive power of labour that
accompany it, and of accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a
certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a condition of the
specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter causes conversely an
accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital,
therefore, the specifically capitalistic mode of production develops, and with
the capitalist mode of production the accumulation of capital. Both these
economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they
reciprocally give one another, that change in the technical composition of
capital by which the variable constituent becomes always smaller and smaller as
compared with the constant.
Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of
production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller labour-army.
Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing
mass of wealth which functions as capital, accumulation increases the
concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and
thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and of the specific
methods of capitalist production. The growth of social capital is
effected by the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances
remaining the same, individual capitals, and with them the concentration of the
means of production, increase in such proportion as they form aliquot parts of
the total social capital. At the same time portions of the original capitals
disengage themselves and function as new independent capitals. Besides other
causes, the division of property, within capitalist families, plays a great
part in this. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of
capitalists grows to a greater or less extent. Two points characterise this
kind of concentration which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with,
accumulation. First: The increasing concentration of the social means of
production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining
equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The part of
social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided
among many capitalists who face one another as independent commodity-producers
competing with each other. Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it
are, therefore, not only scattered over many points, but the increase of each
functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new and the sub-division of
old capitals. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as
increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over
labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual capitals one from
another.
This splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals
or the repulsion of its fractions one from another, is counteracted by their
attraction. This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of
production and of the command over labour, which is identical with
accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of
their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist,
transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from
the former in this, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of
capital already to hand, and functioning; its field of action is therefore not
limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute limits of
accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand,
because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation
proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.
The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital
by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice.
The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness
of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of
labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger
capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with
the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in
the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under
its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd
into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or
incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the
number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic
capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals
partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this,
with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play — the
credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble
assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated
capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered,
over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes
a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally
transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of
capitals.
Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and
accumulation there develop the two most powerful levers of centralisation
— competition and credit. At the same time the progress of accumulation
increases the material amenable to centralisation, i.e., the
individual capitals, whilst the expansion of capitalist production creates, on
the one hand, the social want, and, on the other, the technical means necessary
for those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous
centralisation of capital for their accomplishment. Today, therefore, the force
of attraction, drawing together individual capitals, and the tendency to
centralisation are stronger than ever before. But if the relative extension and
energy of the movement towards centralisation is determined, in a certain
degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and superiority of economic
mechanism already attained, progress in centralisation does not in any way
depend upon a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital. And this is the specific difference between centralisation and
concentration, the latter being only another name for reproduction on an
extended scale. Centralisation may result from a mere change in the
distribution of capitals already existing, from a simple alteration in the
quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital. Here capital
can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because there it has been
withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry
centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals
invested in it were fused into
a single capital. In a given society the limit would
be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of
either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.
Centralisation completes the work of accumulation by enabling industrial
capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this latter result
is the consequence of accumulation or centralisation, whether centralisation is
accomplished by the violent method of annexation — when certain capitals
become such preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter the
individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to
themselves — or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed
or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organising
joint-stock companies — the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere
the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting point for a
more comprehensive organisation of the collective work of many, for a wider
development of their material motive forces — in other words, for the
progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by
customary methods, into processes of production socially combined and
scientifically arranged.
But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it
passes from the circular to the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure
compared with centralisation, which has only to change the quantitative
groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still be
without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few
individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a
railway. Centralisation, on the contrary, accomplished this in the twinkling of
an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And whilst centralisation thus
intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously
extends and speeds those revolutions in the technical composition of capital
which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus
diminishing the relative demand for labour.
The masses of capital fused together overnight by centralisation reproduce
and multiply as the others do, only more rapidly, thereby becoming new and
powerful levers in social accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the
progress of social accumulation we tacitly include — today — the
effects of centralisation.
The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation (see
Chapter XXIV, Section 1) serve particularly as vehicles for
the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and industrial
improvements in general. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of
renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others
in a perfected technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour will
suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials. The
absolute reduction in the demand for labour which necessarily follows from this
is obviously so much the greater the higher the degree in which the capitals
undergoing this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the
centralisation movement.
On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of
accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude.
On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced with change of
composition, repels more and more of the labourers formerly employed by it.
Section 3.
Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial
Reserve Army
The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as its quantitative
extension only, is effected, as we have seen, under a progressive qualitative
change in its composition, under a constant increase of its constant, at the
expense of its variable constituent.
The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the
productive power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting
in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance
of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much
quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total
social capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of the individual capitals
of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological
composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change
in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of
accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital
changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1,
4:1, 5:1, 7:1, &c., so that, as the capital increases, instead of ½ of its
total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, &c., is transformed into
labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into
means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the
amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that
demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of,
as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the
magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude
increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or
the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly
diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which
accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical
basis. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital,
accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an
additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant
metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In
its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of
new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of
its variable, as compared with its constant constituent. This accelerated
relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with the
accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this
increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute
increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly
than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it
is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in
the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant
population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than
suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore
a surplus population.
Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its
accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a
whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different
spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital
occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple
centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with
absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power
absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its
given technical basis, and attracts additional labour power
in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic
change, and lessens its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of
the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed
by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production
of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of
the repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less
real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring
population through the usual channels. With the magnitude of social capital already
functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale of
production, and the mass of the labourers set in motion, with the development
of the productiveness of their labour, with the greater breadth and fulness of
all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater
attraction of labourers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion;
the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of
spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now
alternately. The labouring population therefore produces, along with the
accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made
relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it
does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the
capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic
mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid
within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.
But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation
or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population
becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition
of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable
industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the
latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual
increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the
self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for
exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of
labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows
also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already
functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society
expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not merely because
credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this
wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it
grows, also, because the technical conditions of the process of production
themselves — machinery, means of transport, &c. — now admit of
the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional means
of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of
accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself
frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or
into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows
out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the
possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points
without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation
supplies these masses. The course characteristic of modern industry,
viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of
periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and
stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption,
and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In
their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus
population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction.
This peculiar course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of
human history, was also impossible in the childhood of capitalist production.
The composition of capital changed but very slowly. With its accumulation,
therefore, there kept pace, on the whole, a corresponding growth in the demand
for labour. Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more
modern times, it found a check in the natural limits of the exploitable
labouring population, limits which could only be got rid of by forcible means
to be mentioned later. The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of
production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction; the latter
again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human
material, without an increase, in the number of labourers independently of the
absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple
process that constantly “sets free” a part of the labourers; by
methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the
increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry
depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring
population into unemployed or half-employed hands. The superficiality of
Political Economy shows itself in the fact that it looks upon the expansion and
contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes of the
industrial cycle, as their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a
certain definite motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as
soon as it is once thrown into this movement of alternate expansion and
contraction. Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the varying accidents
of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the
form of periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political
Economy then sees that the production of a relative surplus population —
i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs of the self-expansion
of capital — is a necessary condition of modern industry.
“Suppose,” says H. Merivale, formerly Professor
of Political Economy at Oxford, subsequently employed in the English Colonial
Office, “suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises, the
nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration of some
hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? That,
at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a
deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all
events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the
profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the
prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for
the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured
to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have
hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their
operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of
the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of
competition on which the wealth of the country is founded.”
Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modern industry,
though, after his narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of
the labouring population, not by their becoming relatively supernumerary. He
says:
“Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to
a considerable extent among the labouring class of a country mainly depending
upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it.... From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot
be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till after the
lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving,
may take place much more rapidly: a country is always liable to an increase in
the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the
increase of population.”
After Political Economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a
relative surplus population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic
accumulation, she very aptly, in the guise of an old maid, puts in the mouth of
her “beau ideal” of a capitalist the following words addressed to
those supernumeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation of additional
capital: —
“We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are
increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by
accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence.”
Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of
disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields. It
requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these
natural limits.
Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or
diminution of the variable capital corresponds rigidly with the
increase or diminution of the number of labourers employed.
The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the same, or even
fall, while the variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual
labourer yields more labour, and therefore his wages increase, and this
although the price of labour remains the same or even falls, only more slowly
than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case,
becomes an index of more labour, but not of more labourers employed. It is the
absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out
of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about
the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in
proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former that increase is
much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this
motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital.
We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production and
of the productive power of labour — at once the cause and effect of
accumulation — enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable
capital, to set in action more labour by greater exploitation (extensive or
intensive) of each individual labour power. We have further seen that the
capitalist buys with the same capital a greater mass of labour power, as he
progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature labour power
by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or
children.
On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation, a larger
variable capital sets more labour in action without enlisting more labourers;
on the other, a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in action more
labour with the same mass of labour power; and, finally, a greater number of
inferior labour powers by displacement of higher.
The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of
labourers, goes on therefore yet more rapidly than the technical revolution of
the process of production that accompanies, and is accelerated by, the advance
of accumulation; and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the
variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the means of
production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less
extent means of employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified
by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases,
capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for
labourers. The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the
ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by
its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to
subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one
part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other
part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual
capitalists, and accelerates
at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale
corresponding with the advance of social accumulation. How important is this
element in the formation of the relative surplus population, is shown by the
example of England. Her technical means for saving labour are colossal.
Nevertheless, if to-morrow morning labour generally were reduced to a rational
amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the working class
according to age and sex, the working population to hand would be absolutely
insufficient for the carrying on of national production on its present scale.
The great majority of the labourers now “unproductive” would have
to be turned into “productive” ones.
Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively
regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and
these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They
are, therefore, not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the
working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class
is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the
relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is now
absorbed, now set free. For Modern Industry with its decennial cycles and
periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation advances, are complicated by
irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly,
that would indeed be a beautiful law, which pretends to make the
action of capital dependent on the absolute variation of the population,
instead of regulating the demand and supply of labour by the alternate
expansion and contraction of capital, the labour-market now appearing
relatively under-full, because capital is expanding, now again over-full,
because it is contracting. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According
to them, wages rise in consequence of accumulation of capital. The higher wages
stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on
until the labour-market becomes too full, and therefore capital, relatively to
the supply of labour, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the
reverse of the medal. The working population is little by little decimated as
the result of the fall in wages, so that capital is again in excess relatively
to them, or, as others explain it, falling wages and the corresponding increase
in the exploitation of the labourer again accelerates accumulation, whilst, at
the same time, the lower wages hold the increase of the working class in check.
Then comes again the time, when the supply of labour is less than the demand,
wages rise, and so on. A beautiful mode of motion this for developed capitalist
production! Before, in consequence of the rise of wages, any positive increase
of the population really fit for work could occur, the time would have been
passed again and again, during which the industrial campaign must have been
carried through, the battle fought and won.
Between 1849 and 1859, a rise of wages practically insignificant, though
accompanied by falling prices of corn, took place in the English agricultural
districts. In Wiltshire, e.g., the weekly wages rose from 7s. to 8s.;
in Dorsetshire from 7s. or 8s., to 9s., &c. This was the result of an
unusual exodus of the agricultural surplus population caused by the demands of
war, the vast extension of railroads, factories, mines, &c. The lower the
wages, the higher is the proportion in which ever so insignificant a rise of
them expresses itself. If the weekly wage, e.g., is 20s. and it rises
to 22s., that is a rise of 10 per cent.; but if it is only 7s. and it rises to
9s., that is a rise of 28 4/7 per cent., which sounds very fine. Everywhere the
farmers were howling, and the London Economist, with reference to
these starvation-wages, prattled quite seriously of “a general and
substantial advance.”
What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until, in consequence of this
brilliant remuneration, the agricultural labourers had so increased and
multiplied that their wages must fall again, as prescribed by the dogmatic
economic brain? They introduced more machinery, and in a moment the labourers
were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory even to the
farmers. There was now “more capital” laid out in agriculture than
before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell,
not only relatively, but absolutely.
The above economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate the general
movement of wages, or the ratio between the working class —
i.e., the total labour power — and the total social capital,
with the laws that distribute the working population over the different spheres
of production. If, e.g., in consequence of favourable circumstances,
accumulation in a particular sphere of production becomes especially active,
and profits in it, being greater than the average profits, attract additional
capital, of course the demand for labour rises and wages also rise. The higher
wages draw a larger part of the working population into the more favoured
sphere, until it is glutted with labour power, and wages at length fall again
to their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great. Then, not
only does the immigration of labourers into the branch of industry in question
cease; it gives place to their emigration. Here the political economist thinks
he sees the why and wherefore of an absolute increase of workers accompanying
an increase of wages, and of a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute
increase of labourers. But he sees really only the local oscillation of the
labour-market in a particular sphere of production — he sees only the
phenomena accompanying the distribution of the working population into the
different spheres of outlay of capital, according to its varying needs.
The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average
prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of
over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative
surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and
supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the
limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the
domination of capital.
This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of economic
apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new, or
the extension of old, machinery, a portion of variable capital is transformed
into constant, the economic apologist interprets this operation which
“fixes” capital and by that very act sets labourers
“free,” in exactly the opposite way, pretending that it sets free
capital for the labourers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of
these apologists. What are set free are not only the labourers immediately
turned out by the machines, but also their future substitutes in the rising
generation, and the additional contingent, that with the usual extension of
trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed. They are now all “set
free,” and every new bit of capital looking out for employment
can dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the
general labour demand will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take
out of the market as many labourers as the machines threw upon it. If it
employs a smaller number, that of the supernumeraries increases; if it employs
a greater, the general demand for labour only increases to the extent of the
excess of the employed over those “set free.” The impulse that
additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have given to the
general demand for labour, is therefore in every case neutralised to the extent
of the labourers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say, the
mechanism of capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute
increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general
demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery,
the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the
transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The
demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor supply of
labour with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent
forces working on one another. Les dés sont pipés.
Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the
one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply
of labourers by the “setting free” of them, whilst at the same time
the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more
labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent,
independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and
demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon,
therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the
same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as
the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even
their function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and
more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity
of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the
relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions, &c., they
try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order
to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic
production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political
Economy, cry out at the infringement of the “eternal” and so to say
“sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed
and unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. But,
on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse
circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with it,
the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class,
capital, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the
“sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to check its
inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.
Section 4.
Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of
Capitalistic Accumulation
The relative surplus population exists in every possible form. Every
labourer belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or
wholly unemployed. Not taking into account the great periodically recurring
forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an
acute form during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times
— it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant.
In the centres of modern industry — factories, manufactures,
ironworks, mines, &c. — the labourers are sometimes repelled,
sometimes attracted again in greater masses, the number of those employed
increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the
scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form.
In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery
enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out,
large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is
once reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same
branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This
majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, growing with the
extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in
fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population
grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. That the natural
increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the
accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a
contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger
numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is
not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of
hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the
division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry.
The consumption of labour power by capital is, besides, so rapid
that the labourer, half-way through his life, has already more or less
completely lived himself out. He falls into the ranks of the supernumeraries,
or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely
among the work-people of modern industry that we meet with the shortest
duration of life. Dr. Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated
“that the average age at death of the Manchester ...
upper middle class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the
labouring class was 17; while at Liverpool those figures were represented as 35
against 15. It thus appeared that the well-to-do classes had a lease of life
which was more than double the value of that which fell to the lot of the less
favoured citizens.”
In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this
section of the proletariat must take place under conditions that shall swell
their numbers, although the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence,
rapid renewal of the generations of labourers (this law does not hold for the
other classes of the population). This social need is met by early marriages, a
necessary consequence of the conditions in which the labourers of modern
industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of children sets on
their production.
As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in
proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for an agricultural
labouring population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital
employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being, as in
non-agricultural industries, compensated by a greater attraction. Part of the
agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over
into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the look-out for
circumstances favourable to this transformation. (Manufacture is used here in
the sense of all non-agricultural industries.) This source of relative surplus population is thus
constantly flowing. But the constant flow towards the towns
pre-supposes, in the country itself, a constant latent surplus
population, the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of
outlet open to exceptional width. The agricultural labourer is therefore
reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the
swamp of pauperism.
The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a
part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence
it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power.
Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working
class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist
exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of
wages. We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of
“domestic industry.” It recruits itself
constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture,
and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is
yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with
the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population
advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and
self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater
part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact,
not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of the families
stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and therefore to the amount
of means of subsistence of which the different categories of labourers dispose.
This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even
civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals
individually weak and constantly hunted down.
The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the
sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word,
the “dangerous” classes, this layer of society consists of three
categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at
the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers
increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade.
Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial
reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g.,
speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of
labourers. Third, the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly
people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of
labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of
industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of
mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c.
Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the
industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative
surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population,
pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist
development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist
production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its
own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and
energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat
and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve
army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop
also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial
reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the
greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater
is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse
ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers
of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official
pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.
Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances,
the analysis of which does not concern us here.
The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the
labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The
mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this
adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative
surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of
constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight
of pauperism.
The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production,
thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in
movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law,
in a capitalist society — where the labourer does not employ the means of
production, but the means of production employ the labourer — undergoes a
complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of
labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of
employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of
existence, viz., the sale of their own labour power for the increasing
of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that
the means of production, and the productiveness of labour, increase more
rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore,
capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always
increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this
increase for its own self-expansion.
We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value:
within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness
of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means
for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination
over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a
fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine,
destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they
estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the
same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they
distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour
process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his
life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of
the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value
are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of
accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It
follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the
labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The
law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or
industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law
rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did
Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding
with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore,
at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance,
brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side
of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. This antagonistic character of
capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political
economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some
extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to
pre-capitalistic modes of production.
The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the 18th
century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural
law of social wealth.
“In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils
always balance one another (il bene ed il male economico in una nazione sempre
all, istessa misura): the abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal
to the want of it with others (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale
alia mancanza di essi in altri): the great riches of a small number are
always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries of life
for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and
its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in
others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and
active,” &c.
In a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years after Ortes, the Church of England
parson, Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth.
“Legal constraint (to labour) is attended with too much
trouble, violence, and noise, whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent,
unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it
calls forth the most powerful exertions.”
Everything therefore depends upon making hunger permanent among the working
class, and for this, according to Townsend, the principle of population,
especially active among the poor, provides.
“It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be
to a certain degree improvident” [i.e., so improvident as to be
born without a silver spoon in the mouth], “that there may
always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid,
and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is
thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from
drudgery ... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those
callings which are suited to their various dispositions ... it” [the Poor
Law] “tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of
that system which God and Nature have established in the world.” If the Venetian monk
found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal, the raison
d’être of Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries and holy houses,
the Protestant prebendary finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws in
virtue of which the poor possessed a right to a miserable public relief.
“The progress of social wealth,” says Storch,
“begets this useful class of society ... which performs the most
wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which takes, in a word,
on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures
thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional”
[c’est bon!] “dignity of character.”
Storch asks himself in what then really consists the progress of this
capitalistic civilisation with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as
compared with barbarism. He finds but one answer: security!
“Thanks to the advance of industry and science,”
says Sismondi, “every labourer can produce every day much more than his
consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst his labour produces wealth,
that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit
for labour.” According to him, “men” [i.e.,
non-workers] “would probably prefer to do without all artistic
perfection, and all the enjoyments that manufacturers procure for us, if it
were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil like that of the
labourer.... Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the
same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works
that the other rests.... The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers
of labour can then only have for result the increase of luxury and enjoyment of
the idle rich.”
Finally Destutt de Tracy, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, blurts out
brutally:
“In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich
nations they are generally poor.”
Section 5.
Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
A. England from 1846-1866
No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist
accumulation as the period of the last 20 years. It is as if this period had
found Fortunatus’ purse. But of all countries England again furnishes the
classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world-market,
because capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and lastly,
because the introduction of the Free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off
the last retreat of vulgar economy. The titanic advance of production —
the latter half of the 20 years’ period again far surpassing the former
— has been already pointed out sufficiently in Part IV.
Although the absolute increase of the English population in the last half
century was very great, the relative increase or rate of growth fell
constantly, as the following table borrowed from the census shows.
Annual increase per cent. of the population of England and Wales in decimal
numbers:
1811-1821
1.533 per cent.
1821-1831
1.446 per cent.
1831-1841
1.326 per cent.
1841-1851
1.216 per cent.
1851-1861
1.141 per cent.
Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of wealth. Here the
movement of profit, rent of land, &c., that come under the income tax,
furnishes the surest basis. The increase of profits liable to income tax
(farmers and some other categories not included) in Great Britain from 1853 to
1864 amounted to 50.47% or 4.58% as the annual average, that of the population during the same period to
about 12%. The augmentation of the rent of land subject to taxation (including
houses, railways, mines, fisheries, &c.), amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38%
or 3 5/12% annually. Under this head the following categories show the greatest
increase:
Excess of annual income
of 1864 over that of 1853
Increase
per year
Houses
38.60%
3.50%
Quarries
84.76%
7.70%
Mines
68.85%
6.26%
Ironworks
39.92%
3.63%
Fisheries
57.37%
5.21%
Gasworks
126.02%
11.45%
Railways
83.29%
7.57%
If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive
years each, the rate of augmentation of the income increases constantly. It is, e.g., for that
arising from profits between 1853 to 1857, 1.73% yearly; 1857-1861, 2.74%, and
for 1861-64, 9.30% yearly. The sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that
come under the income tax was in 1856, £307,068,898; in 1859, £328,127,416; in
1862, £351,745,241; in 1863, £359,142,897; in 1864, £362,462,279; in 1865,
£385,530,020.
The accumulation of capital was attended at the same time by its
concentration and centralisation. Although no official statistics of
agriculture existed for England (they did for Ireland), they were voluntarily
given in 10 counties. These statistics gave the result that from 1851 to 1861
the number of farms of less than 100 acres had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so
that 5,016 had been thrown together into larger farms. From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than
£1,000,000 came under the succession duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, 8 did;
and 4 from 1856 to June, 1859, i.e., in 4½ years. The centralisation will, however,
be best seen from a short analysis of the Income Tax Schedule D (profits,
exclusive of farms, &c.), in the years 1864 and 1865. I note beforehand
that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything over £60. These
incomes liable to taxation in England, Wales and Scotland, amounted in 1864 to
£95,844,222, in 1865 to £105,435,579. The number of persons taxed were in 1864, 308,416,
out of a population of 23,891,009; in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of
24,127,003. The following table shows the distribution of these incomes in the
two years:
Year ending
April 5th, 1864.
Year ending
April 5th, 1865.
Income from
Profits
Income from
People
Income from
Profits
Income from
People
Total Income
£95,844,222
308,416
105,435,738
332,431
of these
57,028,289
23,334
64,554,297
24,265
of these
36,415,225
3,619
42,535,576
4,021
of these
22,809,781
832
27,555,313
973
of these
8,744,762
91
11,077,238
107
In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,453,079 tons of coal,
of value £16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855,
3,218,154 tons of pig-iron, of value £8,045,385; 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value
£11,919,877. In 1854 the length of the railroads worked in the United Kingdom
was 8,054 miles, with a paid-up capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the length was
12,789 miles, with capital paid up of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum of
the exports and imports of the United Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865,
£489,923,285. The following table shows the movement of the exports:
1846
£58,842,377
1849
63,596,052
1856
115,826,948
1860
135,842,817
1865
165,862,402
1866
188,917,563
After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph of the
Registrar-General of the British people:
“Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not
kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth.”
Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of
this wealth, to the working class.
“It is one of the most melancholy features in the
social state of this country,” says Gladstone, “that while there
was a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, and while there was an
increase in the privations and distress of the labouring class and operatives,
there was at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper
classes, and a constant increase of capital.”
Thus spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of February 13th,
1843. On April 16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in which he introduced
his Budget:
“From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country
increased by 6 per cent.... In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased
from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent.! The fact is so astonishing as to
be almost incredible ... this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ...
entirely confined to classes of property ... must be of indirect benefit to the
labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption.
While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor.
At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to
say.”
How lame an anti-climax! If the working class has remained
“poor,” only “less poor” in proportion as it produces
for the wealthy class “an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power,” then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of
poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth
have. As to the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official
statistics, e.g., the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an
increase in price of 20% for the average of the three years 1860-1862, compared
with 1851-1853. In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a
progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt, coals, and a
number of other necessary means of subsistence. Gladstone’s next Budget speech of
April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric dithyrambus on the advance of
surplus-value-making and the happiness of the people “tempered by
poverty.” He speaks of masses “on the border” of pauperism,
of branches of trade in which “wages have not increased,” and
finally sums up the happiness of the working class in the words:
“human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a
struggle for existence.”
Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official
considerations, declares roundly:
“I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been
augmented by this increase of capital (in the last ten years), but this
apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries
of life are becoming dearer” (he believes because of the fall in value of
the precious metals)..."the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is no
perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial classes.... They
(the labourers) become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to whom they owe
money.”
In the chapters on the “working-day” and
“machinery,” the reader has seen under what circumstances the
British working class created an “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power” for the propertied classes. There we were chiefly concerned with
the social functioning of the labourer. But for a full elucidation of the law
of accumulation, his condition outside the workshop must also be looked at, his
condition as to food and dwelling. The limits of this book compel us to concern
ourselves chiefly with the worst paid part of the industrial proletariat, and
with the agricultural labourers, who together form the majority of the working
class.
But first, one word on official pauperism, or on that part of the working
class which has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labour
power), and vegetates upon public alms. The official list of
paupers numbered in England 851,369 persons; in 1856, 877,767; in 1865, 971,433.
In consequence of the cotton famine, it grew in the years 1863 and 1864 to
1,079,382 and 1,014,978. The crisis of 1866, which fell most heavily on London,
created in this centre of the world market, more populous than the kingdom of
Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year 1866 of 19.5% compared with
1865, and of 24.4% compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the
first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. From the analysis of the statistics
of pauperism, two points are to be taken. On the one hand, the fluctuation up
and down of the number of paupers, reflects the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. On the other, the official statistics
become more and more misleading as to the actual extent of pauperism in
proportion as, with the accumulation of capital, the class-struggle, and,
therefore, the class consciousness of the working men, develop. E.g.,
the barbarity in the treatment of the paupers, at which the English Press
(The Times, Pall Mall Gazette, etc.) have cried out so loudly during
the last two years, is of ancient date. F. Engels showed in 1844 exactly the
same horrors, exactly the same transient canting outcries of “sensational
literature.” But frightful increase of “deaths by starvation”
in London during the last ten years proves beyond doubt the growing horror in
which the working-people hold the slavery of the workhouse, that place of
punishment for misery.
B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class
During the cotton famine of 1862, Dr. Smith was charged by the Privy Council
with an inquiry into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed operatives
in Lancashire and Cheshire. His observations during many preceding years had
led him to the conclusion that “to avert starvation diseases,” the
daily food of an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon
with 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at least 4,300
grains of carbon with 200 grains of nitrogen; for women, about the same
quantity of nutritive elements as are contained in 2 lbs. of good wheaten
bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and women, at
least 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His
calculation was practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its
agreement with the miserable quantity of nourishment to which want had forced
down the consumption of the cotton operatives. This was, in December, 1862,
29,211 grains of carbon, and 1,295 grains of nitrogen weekly.
In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the state of
distress of the worst-nourished part of the English working class. Dr. Simon,
medical officer to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned
Dr. Smith. His inquiry ranges on the one hand over the agricultural labourers,
on the other, over silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers,
glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of
the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the
inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those
comparatively in the best circumstances.
As a general result it was found that
“in only one of the examined classes of in-door
operatives did the average nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it
nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e.,
sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was
defect — in one, a very large defect — of both nitrogen and carbon.
Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it
appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency
of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the
estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties
(Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food
was the average local diet.”
Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of
the United Kingdom, were the worst fed. The insufficiency of food among the agricultural
labourers, fell, as a rule, chiefly on the women and children, for “the
man must eat to do his work.” Still greater penury ravaged the
town-workers examined.
“They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there
must be many cases of severe and injurious privation.”
(“Privation” of the capitalist all this! i.e.,
“abstinence” from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely
necessary for the mere vegetation of his “hands.”)
The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named
categories of purely town-dwelling work-people, as compared with the minimum
assumed by Dr. Smith, and with the food-allowance of the cotton operatives
during the time of their greatest distress:
Both Sexes
Average weekly
carbon
Average weekly
nitrogen
Five in-door
occupations
28,876 grains
1,192 grains
Unemployed Lancashire
Operatives
28,211 grains
1,295 grains
Minimum quantity to be
allowed to the Lancashire
Operatives, equal number
of males and females
28,600 grains
1,330 grains
One half, or 60/125, of the industrial labour categories investigated, had
absolutely no beer, 28% no milk. The weekly average of the liquid means of
nourishment in the families varied from seven ounces in the needle-women to 24¾
ounces in the stocking-makers. The majority of those who did not obtain milk
were needle-women in London. The quantity of bread-stuffs consumed weekly
varied from 7¾ lbs. for the needle-women to 11½ lbs. for the
shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9 lbs. per adult weekly. Sugar
(treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for the kid-glovers to 11 ounces
for the stocking-makers; and the total average per week for all categories was
8 ounces per adult weekly. Total weekly average of butter (fat, etc.) 5 ounces
per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7¼ ounces for
the silk-weavers, to 18¼ ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the
different categories 13.6 ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult, gave the
following average figures; silk-weavers 2s. 2½d., needle-women 2s. 7d.,
kid-glovers 2s. 9½d., shoemakers 2s 7¾d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6¼d. For the
silk-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only 1s. 8½d. The worst categories
were the needle-women, silk-weavers and kid-glovers. Of these facts, Dr. Simon in his General Health
Report says:
“That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is
the cause or the aggravator of disease, can be affirmed by any one who is
conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient
rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point of view, there is, in my opinion, a
very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that
privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness
of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before
insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the
physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which
intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly
destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier
than food — against inclemencies of weather there will have been no
adequate protection — dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree
in which overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and
furniture there will have been scarcely any — even cleanliness will have been
found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to
maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger.
The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where
commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least
scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply,
and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary
dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough
to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude
against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious
moment.... These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that
the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In
all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the
in-door operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for
the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified
sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting.... And on a very large scale
the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to
pauperism.”
The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious
layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or
refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals
itself only when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the
“housing of the poor.” Every unprejudiced observer sees that the
greater the centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the
corresponding heaping together of the labourers, within a given space; that
therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the
dwellings of the working-people. “Improvements” of towns,
accompanying the increase of wealth, by the
demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks,
warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the
carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away
the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places. On the other hand,
every one knows that the dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to their
excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators
with more profit or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi. The
antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and therefore of the
capitalistic relations of property generally, is here so evident, that even the official English
reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on “property and
its rights.” With the development of industry, with the accumulation of
capital, with the growth and “improvement” of towns, the evil makes
such progress that the mere fear of contagious diseases which do not spare even
“respectability,” brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less
than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in
some towns, as Liverpool, Glasgow, &c., took strenuous measures through
their municipalities. Nevertheless Dr. Simon, in his report of 1865, says:
“Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are
uncontrolled in England.”
By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the
conditions of the housing of the agricultural labourers, in 1865 of the poorer
classes in the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr. Julian Hunter
are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on
“Public Health.” To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later.
On the condition of town dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a general remark
of Dr. Simon.
“Although my official point of view,” he says,
“is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other
aspect of this evil should not be ignored .... In its higher
degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such
negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily
functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial
than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must
become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children
who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And
beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should
ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilisation which has its
essence in physical and moral cleanliness.”
London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations,
absolutely unfit for human beings.
“He feels clear,” says Dr. Hunter, “on two
points; first, that there are about 20 large colonies in London, of about
10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition exceeds almost anything he has
seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house
accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated condition of the
houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case 20 years ago.”
“It is not too much to
say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal.”
Further, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small
shopkeepers and other elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more
and more under the curse of these vile conditions of dwelling, in proportion as
“improvements,” and with them the demolition of old streets and
houses, advance, as factories and the afflux of human beings grow in the
metropolis, and finally as house rents rise with the ground-rents.
“Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can
afford more than one room.”
There is almost no house-property in London that is not overburdened with a
number of middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in
comparison with its yearly revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on
getting rid of it again at a jury price (the expropriation valuation fixed by
jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value arising from the
neighbourhood of some large establishment. As a consequence of this there is a
regular trade in the purchase of “fag-ends of leases.”
“Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to
do as they do — get all they can from the tenants while they have them,
and leave as little as they can for their successors.”
The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In consequence of the
making of railroads in the City,
“the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of
London of a number of families wandering about some Saturday night with their
scanty worldly goods on their backs, without any resting place but the
workhouse.”
The workhouses are already over-crowded, and the “improvements”
already sanctioned by Parliament are only just begun. If labourers
are driven away by the demolition of their old houses, they do not leave their
old parish, or at most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can get
to it.
“They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to
their workshops. The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish,
parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those....
Even at an advanced rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to
get an accommodation so good as the meagre one they have left.... Half the
workmen ... of the Strand ... walked two miles to their work.”
This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea
of the wealth of London, may serve as an example of the packing together of
human beings in that town. In one of its parishes, the Officer of Health
reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the
Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood that every sanitary measure,
which, as has been the case hitherto in London, hunts the labourers from one
quarter, by demolishing uninhabitable houses, serves only to crowd them
together yet more closely in another.
“Either,” says Dr. Hunter, “the whole
proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public compassion (!)
be effectually aroused to the obligation which may now be without exaggeration
called national, of supplying cover to those who by reason of their having no
capital, cannot provide it for themselves, though they can by periodical
payments reward those who will provide it for them.”
Admire this capitalistic justice! The owner of land, of houses, the
businessman, when expropriated by “improvements” such as railroads,
the building of new streets, &c., not only receives full indemnity. He
must, according to law, human and divine, be comforted for his enforced
“abstinence” over and above this by a thumping profit. The
labourer, with his wife and child and chattels, is thrown out into the street,
and — if he crowds in too large numbers towards quarters of the town
where the vestries insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of
sanitation!
Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century no single town
in England of 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there
are 28 towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants.
“The result of this change is not only that the class
of town people is enormously increased, but the old close-packed little towns
are now centres, built round on every side, open nowhere to air, and being no
longer agreeable to the rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter
outskirts. The successors of these rich are occupying the larger
houses at the rate of a family to each room [... and find
accommodation for two or three lodgers ...] and a population, for which the
houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings
are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children.”
The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town,
the more rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more
miserable are the improvised dwellings of the labourers.
Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district of growing
productiveness, takes the next place after London in the housing inferno. Not
less than 34,000 persons live there in single rooms. Because of their absolute
danger to the community, houses in great numbers have lately been destroyed by
the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses
progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was, therefore, in
1865, more full than ever. Scarcely a room was to let. Dr. Embleton, of the
Newcastle Fever Hospital, says:
“There can be little doubt that the great cause of the
continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding of human
beings, and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated
in confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and
cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any
civilised community; in them men, women, and children lie at night huddled
together: and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and
the day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time together, the
beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water
and worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous.”
The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s.
“The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,” says Dr. Hunter,
“contains a sample of the finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by
external circumstances of house and street into an almost savage
degradation.”
As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the state of
the dwellings of an industrial town may today be bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or
the aedileship of the town may have pulled itself together for the removal of
the most shocking abuses. Tomorrow, like a swarm of locusts, come crowding in
masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the
hitherto respectable labourer’s dwelling is transformed into a lodging
house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets in the 30
years’ war. Example: Bradford (Yorkshire). There the municipal philistine
was just busied with urban improvements. Besides, there were still in Bradford,
in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited houses. But now comes that revival of trade which
the mildly liberal Mr. Forster, the negro’s friend, recently crowed over
with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an overflow from
the waves of the ever fluctuating “reserve army” or “relative
surplus population.” The frightful cellar habitations and rooms
registered in the list, which
Dr. Hunter obtained from the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most
part inhabited by well-paid labourers. They declared that they would willingly
pay for better dwellings if they were to be had. Meanwhile, they become
degraded, they fall ill, one and all, whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M. P.,
sheds tears over the blessings of Free Trade, and the profits of the eminent
men of Bradford who deal in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865, Dr.
Bell, one of the poor law doctors of Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality
of fever-patients in his district to the nature of their dwellings.
“In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet ...
there are ten persons .... Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys
include 223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants, 435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds — and in that term I include any roll of dirty old rags,
or an armful of shavings — have an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5
and 6 persons to each, and some people, I am told, are absolutely without beds;
they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards — young men and
women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add that many of
these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for human
habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are distributed
amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to fester in
our midst.”
Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its
dwellings.
“Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic
misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe.”
C. The Nomad Population
We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose
occupation is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital,
thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they
are not on the march, they “camp.” Nomad labour is used for various
operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning,
railway-making, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it carries into the
places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp, small-pox, typhus, cholera,
scarlet fever, &c. In
undertakings that involve much capital outlay, such as railways, &c., the
contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and the like,
thus improvising villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control
of the local boards, very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the
labourers in two-fold fashion — as soldiers of industry and as tenants.
According as the wooden hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its inhabitant, navvy,
or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4 shillings weekly. One example will suffice. In
September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal
Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir
George Grey, Home Secretary: —
“Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish
until about twelve months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a
railway from Lewisham to Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the
principal works being in the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was
also established the depôt for the whole of the works, so that a
large number of persons was of necessity employed here. As cottage
accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were built in several
places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr. Jay, for their
especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and,
besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to
accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be, although
there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were, according to
the medical report we received, that in the night-time these poor people were
compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous
smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under
their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal
Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he
spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he
expressed his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless
some sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay promised to
appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from
contagious diseases, might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the
23rd July last, but although since the date of the last Promise there have been
several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease,
yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9th
September instant, Mr. Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of
small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most
disgraceful. I should add, for your (the Home
Secretary’s) information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house,
which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious
diseases, has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past,
and is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox
and fever; that from the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of
five months, there have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the
parish, four of them being in the huts already referred to; that it is
impossible to ascertain the exact number of persons who have suffered from that
disease although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families
keeping it as private as possible.”
The labourers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid
categories of the British proletariat. The price at which they buy their wages
was shown on an earlier page.
Here I merely cast a hurried glance over the conditions of their dwellings. As
a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether its owner or his tenant, builds a
number of cottages for his hands. They receive cottages and coal for firing
“for nothing” — i.e., these form part of their
wages, paid in kind. Those who are not lodged in this way receive in
compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts attract with rapidity a large
population, made up of the miners themselves, and the artisans, shopkeepers,
&c., that group themselves around them. The ground-rents are high, as they
are generally where population is dense. The master tries, therefore, to run
up, within the smallest space possible at the mouth of the pit, just so many
cottages as are necessary to pack together his hands and their families. If new
mines are opened in the neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the
pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only
one point of view is of moment, the “abstinence” of the capitalist
from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable.
“The lodging which is obtained by the pitman and other
labourers connected with the collieries of Northumberland and Durham,”
says Dr. Julian Hunter, “is perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the
dearest of which any large specimens can be found in England, the similar
parishes of Monmouthshire excepted.... The extreme badness is in the high
number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the ground-plot on which a
great number of houses are thrust, the want of water, the absence of privies,
and the frequent placing of one house on the top of another, or distribution
into flats, ... the lessee acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not
resident.”
“In pursuance of my instructions,” says Dr.
Stevens, “I visited most of the large colliery villages in the Durham
Union.... With very few exceptions, the general statement that no means are
taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be true of all of them....
All colliers are bound ['bound,’ an expression which, like bondage, dates
from the age of serfdom] to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months....
If the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the
‘viewer,’ a mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at
the annual ‘binding,’ such men are turned off... It appears to
me that no part of the ‘truck system’ could be worse than
what obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is bound to take
as part of his hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences; he cannot
help himself, and it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him except
his proprietor (he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor
first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably certain. The
collier is also often supplied with water by the proprietor, which, whether it
be good or bad, he has to pay for, or rather he suffers a deduction for from
his wages.”
In conflict with “public opinion,” or even with the Officers of
Health, capital makes no difficulty about “justifying” the
conditions partly dangerous, partly degrading, to which it confines the working
and domestic life of the labourer, on the ground that they are necessary for
profit. It is the same thing when capital “abstains” from
protective measures against dangerous machinery in the factory, from appliances
for ventilation and for safety in mines, &c. It is the same here with the
housing of the miners. Dr. Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, in his
official Report says:
“In apology for the wretched household accommodation
... it is alleged that miners are commonly worked on lease; that the duration
of the lessee’s interest (which in collieries is commonly for 21 years),
is not so long that he should deem it worth his while to create good
accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople and others whom the
work attracts; that even if he were disposed to act liberally in the matter,
this disposition would commonly be defeated by his landlord’s tendency to
fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege
of having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable village which
the labourers of the subterranean property ought to inhabit, and that
prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes others who might
desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report to enter
upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it even
needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were
provided, the cost ... would eventually fall — whether on landlord, or
lessee, or labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are
vouched for in the annexed reports [those of Dr. Hunter, Dr. Stevens, &c.]
a remedy may well be claimed.... Claims of landlordship are
being so used as to do great public wrong. The landlord in his capacity of
mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate, and then in
his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the labourers whom he
collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. The lessee [the
capitalist exploiter] meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for resisting
that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be
exorbitant, the consequences fall, not on him, that his labourers on whom they
fall have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that
neither obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable
inducements towards a ‘strike.’”
D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working class
Before I turn to the regular agricultural labourers, I may be allowed to
show, by one example, how industrial revulsions affect even the best-paid, the
aristocracy, of the working class. It will be remembered that the year 1857
brought one of the great crises with which the industrial cycle periodically
ends. The next termination of the cycle was due in 1866. Already discounted in
the regular factory districts by the cotton famine, which threw much capital
from its wonted sphere into the great centres of the money-market, the crisis
assumed, at this time, an especially financial character. Its outbreak in 1866
was signalised by the failure of a gigantic London Bank, immediately followed
by the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of the great London
branches of industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only over-produced beyond all
measure during the overtrading time, but they had, besides, engaged in enormous
contracts on the speculation that credit would be forthcoming to an equivalent
extent. Now, a terrible reaction set in, that even at this hour (the end of
March, 1867) continues in this and other London industries. To show the condition of the
labourers, I quote the following from the circumstantial report of a
correspondent of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866, and
beginning of 1867, visited the chief centres of distress:
“In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall,
Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen
and their families were in a state of utter destitution, and 3,000
skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of
over half a year’s duration).... I had great difficulty in reaching the
workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it.... They were waiting for their
tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. The yard was a
great square place with an open shed running all round it, and several large
heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also,
were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer weather the
men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up that nobody
could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking
paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he
chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken
up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work,
and got his day’s pay — threepence and an allowance of food. In
another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened
the door of it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together shoulder
to shoulder for the warmth of one another’s bodies and breath. They were
picking oakum and disputing the while as to which could work the longest on a
given quantity of food — for endurance was the point of honour. Seven
thousand ... in this one workhouse ... were recipients of relief ... many
hundreds of them ... it appeared, were, six or eight months ago, earning the
highest wages paid to artisans.... Their number would be more than doubled by
the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse to
apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the
workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey
houses, that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of
the Committee of the Unemployed.... My first call was on an ironworker who had
been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family
sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there
was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young
children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray
in front of the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were
picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the
stone yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per
day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a
melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and
dripping, and a cup of milkless tea.... The next door at which we knocked was
opened by a middle-aged woman, who, without saying a word, led us into a little
back parlour, in which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a
rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness wasabout these
people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again.
‘Nothing have they done, sir,’ said the woman, pointing to her
boys, ‘for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone — all the
twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it
would yield a little to keep us when we got past work. Look at it,’ she
said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bank-book with all its well kept entries
of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how the little
fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by little
and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum
in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as
worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and
it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day.... Our next visit was to
an iron labourer’s wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found
her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered
with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two wretched
children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of nursing as
their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this
pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as
if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead.... On getting
outside a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his
house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty
children, a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to
show.”
On the after pains of the crisis of 1866, the following extract from a Tory
newspaper. It must not be forgotten that the East-end of London, which is here
dealt with, is not only the seat of the iron shipbuilding mentioned above, but
also of a so-called “home-industry” always underpaid.
“A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one
part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did
not parade with their black flags en masse, the human torrent was
imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying of
hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them.... In
our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed —
next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw
— cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These
thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving,
they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their
miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless
for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves are driven by the parochial
charges to the verge of pauperism.” — (Standard, 5th
April, 1867.)
As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the
Paradise of the labourer because “freedom of labour,” or what is
the same thing, “freedom of capital,” is there limited neither by
the despotism of Trades’ Unions, nor by Factory Acts, a word or two on
the “happiness” of the Belgian labourer. Assuredly no one was more
thoroughly initiated in the mysteries of this happiness than the late M.
Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions,
and member of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his
work: “Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique,”
Bruxelles, 1855. Here we find among other matters, a normal Belgian
labourer’s family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates on
very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with
those of the soldier, sailor, and prisoner. The family “consists of
father, mother, and four children.” Of these 6 persons “four may be
usefully employed the whole year through.” It is assumed that
“there is no sick person nor one incapable of work, among them,”
nor are there “expenses for religious, moral, and intellectual purposes,
except a very small sum for church sittings,” nor “contributions to
savings banks or benefit societies,” nor “expenses due to luxury or
the result of improvidence.” The father and eldest son, however, allow
themselves “the use of tobacco,” and on Sundays “go to the
cabaret,” for which a whole 86 centimes a week are reckoned.
“From a general compilation of wages allowed to the
labourers in different trades, it follows that the highest average of daily
wage is 1 franc 56c., for men, 89 centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and
55 centimes for girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family
would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a-year.... In the family ...
taken as typical we have calculated all possible resources. But in ascribing
wages to the mother of the family we raise the question of the direction of
the household. How will its internal economy be cared for? Who will look
after the young children? Who will get ready the meals, do the washing and
mending? This is the dilemma incessantly presented to the labourers.”
According to this the budget of the family is:
The father
300 working-days at fr. 1.56
fr. 468
mother
300 working-days at fr. 0.89
fr. 267
boy
300 working-days at fr. 0.56
fr. 168
girl
300 working-days at fr. 0.55
fr. 165
Total fr. 1,068
The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the
hypothesis that the labourer has the food of:
The man-of-war’s man
fr. 1,828
Deficit fr. 760
The soldier
fr. 1,473
Deficit fr. 405
The prisoner
fr. 1,112
Deficit fr. 44
“We see that few labouring families can reach, we will
not say the average of the sailor or soldier, but even that of the prisoner.
The general average (of the cost of each prisoner in the different
prisons during the period 1847-1849), has been 63 centimes for all prisons.
This figure, compared with that of the daily maintenance of the labourer, shows
a difference of 13 centimes. It must be remarked further, that if in the
prisons it is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of
administration and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners have not to
pay for their lodging; that the purchases they make at the canteens are not
included in the expenses of maintenance, and that these expenses are greatly
lowered in consequence of the large number of persons that make up the
establishments, and of contracting for or buying wholesale, the food and other
things that enter into their consumption.... How comes it, however, that a
great number, we might say, a great majority, of labourers, live in a more
economical way? It is ... by adopting expedients, the secret of which only the
labourer knows; by reducing his daily rations; by substituting rye-bread for
wheat; by eating less meat, or even none at all, and the same with butter and
condiments; by contenting themselves with one or two rooms where the family is
crammed together, where boys and girls sleep side by side, often on the same
pallet; by economy of clothing, washing, decency; by giving up the Sunday
diversions; by, in short, resigning themselves to the most painful privations.
Once arrived at this extreme limit, the least rise in the price of food,
stoppage of work, illness, increases the labourer’s distress and
determines his complete ruin; debts accumulate, credit fails, the most
necessary clothes and furniture are pawned, and finally, the family asks to be
enrolled on the list of paupers.” (Ducpétiaux, l. c., pp. 151, 154,
155.)
In fact, in this “Paradise of capitalists” there follows, on the
smallest change in the price of the most essential means of subsistence, a
change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See Manifesto of the Maatschappij:
“De Vlamingen Vooruit!” Brussels, 1860, pp. 15, 16.) In all Belgium
are 930,000 families, of whom, according to the official statistics, 90,000 are
wealthy and on the list of voters = 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the
lower middle-class in towns and villages, the greater part of them constantly
sinking into the proletariat, = 1,950,000 persons. Finally, 450,000 working
class families = 2,250,000 persons, of whom the model ones enjoy the happiness
depicted by Ducpétiaux. Of the 450,000 working class families, over 200,000 are
on the pauper list.
E. The British Agricultural Proletariat
Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalistic production and
accumulation assert itself more brutally than in the progress of English
agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and the retrogression of the English
agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid
retrospect. Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the 18th
century, although the revolution in landed property, from which the changed
mode of production starts as a basis, has a much earlier date.
If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful observer, though a
superficial thinker, as to the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter plays
a very pitiable part compared with his predecessor of the end of the 14th
century,
“when the labourer ... could live in plenty, and
accumulate wealth,”
not to speak of the 15th century, “the golden age of the
English labourer in town and country.” We need not, however, go back so
far. In a very instructive work of the year 1777 we read:
“The great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him
[the gentleman]; while the poor labourer is depressed almost to the earth. His
unfortunate situation will fully appear, by taking a comparative view of it,
only forty years ago, and at present.... Landlord and tenant ... have both gone
hand in hand in keeping the labourer down.”
It is then proved in detail that the real agricultural wages between 1737
and 1777 fell nearly ¼ or 25 per cent.
“Modern policy,” says Dr. Richard Price also,
“is, indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people; and the
consequences may in time prove that the whole kingdom will consist of only
gentry and beggars, or of grandees and slaves.”
Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to
1780, with regard to his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect,
amusements, &c., is an ideal never attained again since that
time. His average wage expressed in pints of wheat was from 1770 to 1771, 90
pints, in Eden’s time (1797) only 65, in 1808 but 60.
The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War,
during which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers,
stockbrokers, army-contractors, &c., enriched themselves so
extraordinarily, has been already indicated above. The nominal wages rose in
consequence partly of the bank-note depreciation, partly of a rise in the price
of the primary means of subsistence independent of this depreciation. But the
actual wage-variation can be evidenced in a very simple way, without entering
into details that are here unnecessary. The Poor Law and its administration
were in 1795 and 1814 the same. It will be remembered how this law was carried
out in the country districts: in the form of alms the parish made up the
nominal wage to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the
labourer. The ratio between the wages paid by the farmer, and the wage-deficit
made good by the parish, shows us two things. First, the falling of wages below
their minimum; second, the degree in which the agricultural labourer was a
compound of wage labourer and pauper, or the degree in which he had been turned
into a serf of his parish. Let us take one county that represents the average
condition of things in all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average
weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly
expenditure of a family of 6 persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income, £29
18s.; deficit made good by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county,
the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of 5
persons, £54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36, 2s.; deficit made good by the
parish, £18 6s. 4d. In 1795
the deficit was less than 1/4 the wage, in 1814, more than half. It is
self-evident that, under these circumstances, the meagre comforts that Eden
still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer, had vanished by 1814.
Of all the animals kept by the
farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was, thenceforth, the
most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.
The same state of things went on quietly until
“the Swing riots, in 1830, revealed to us
(i.e., the ruling classes) by the light of blazing corn-stacks, that
misery and black mutinous discontent smouldered quite as fiercely under the
surface of agricultural as of manufacturing England.”
At this time, Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the
agricultural labourers “white slaves,” and a Bishop echoed the
epithet in the Upper House. The most notable political economist of that period
— E. G. Wakefield — says:
“The peasant of the South of England ... is not a
freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a pauper.”
The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the
condition of the agricultural labourers. On the one hand, it was to the
interest of the middle-class agitators to prove how little the Corn Laws
protected the actual producers of the corn. On the other hand, the industrial
bourgeoisie foamed with sullen rage at the denunciations of the factory system
by the landed aristocracy, at the pretended sympathy with the woes of the
factory operatives, of those utterly corrupt, heartless, and genteel loafers,
and at their “diplomatic zeal” for factory legislation. It is an
old English proverb that “when thieves fall out, honest men come by their
own,” and, in fact, the noisy, passionate quarrel between the two
fractions of the ruling class about the question, which of the two exploited
the labourers the more shamefully, was on each hand the midwife of the truth.
Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was commander-in-chief in the aristocratic,
philanthropic, anti-factory campaign. He was, therefore, in 1845, a favourite
subject in the revelations of the Morning Chronicle on the condition
of the agricultural labourers. This journal, then the most important Liberal
organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts, who did not
content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published
the names both of the labouring families examined and of their landlords. The
following list gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of
Blanford, Wimbourne, and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr. G. Bankes
and of the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that, just like Bankes, this
“low church pope,” this head of English pietists, pockets a great
part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of house-rent:
—
FIRST VILLAGE
(a) Children.
2
3
2
2
6
3
(b) Number of Members in Family.
4
5
4
4
8
5
(c) Weekly Wage of the Men.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
(d) Weekly Wage of the Children.
—
—
—
—
1/-, 1/6
1/-, 2/-
(e) Weekly Income of the whole Family.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
8s. 0d.
10s. 6d.
7s. 0d.
(f) Weekly Rent.
2s. 0d.
1s. 6d.
1s. 0d.
1s. 0d.
2s. 0d.
1s. 4d.
(g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of
Rent.
6s. 0d.
6s. 6d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
8s. 6d.
5s. 8d.
(h) Weekly income per head.
1s. 6d.
1s. 3½d.
1s. 9d.
1s. 9d.
1s. 0 3/4d.
1s. 1½d.
SECOND VILLAGE
(a) Children.
6
6
8
4
3
(b) Number of Members in Family.
8
8
10
6
5
(c) Weekly Wage of the Men.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
(d) Weekly Wage of the Children.
1/-, 1/6
1/-, 1/6
—
—
—
(e) Weekly Income of the whole Family.
10s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
(f) Weekly Rent.
1s. 6d.
1s. 3½d.
1s. 3½d.
1s. 6½d.
1s. 6½d.
(g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of
Rent.
8s. 6d.
5s. 8½d.
5s. 8½d.
5s. 5½d.
5s. 5½d.
(h) Weekly income per head.
1s. 0 3/4d.
0s. 8½d.
0s. 7d.
0s. 11d.
1s. 1d.
THIRD VILLAGE
(a) Children.
4
3
0
(b) Number of Members in Family.
6
5
2
(c) Weekly Wage of the Men.
7s. 0d.
7s. 0d.
5s. 0d.
(d) Weekly Wage of the Children.
-
1/- 2/-
1/- 2/6
(e) Weekly Income of the whole Family.
7s. 0d.
11s. 6d.
5s. 0d.
(f) Weekly Rent.
1s. 0d.
0s. 10d.
1s. 0d.
(g) Total Weekly wage after deduction of
Rent.
6s. 0d.
10s. 8d.
4s. 0d.
(h) Weekly income per head.
1s. 0d.
2s. 1 3/5d.
2s. 0d.
The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English
agriculture. Drainage on the
most extensive scale, new methods of stall-feeding, and of the artificial
cultivation of green crops, introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new
treatment of clay soils, increased use of mineral manures, employment of the
steam-engine, and of all kinds of new machinery, more intensive cultivation
generally, characterised this epoch. Mr. Pusey, Chairman of the Royal
Agricultural Society, declares that the (relative) expenses of
farming have been reduced nearly one half by the introduction of new machinery.
On the other hand, the actual return of the soil rose rapidly. Greater outlay
of capital per acre, and, as a consequence, more rapid concentration of farms,
were essential conditions of the new method. At the same time, the area under cultivation increased, from 1846 to
1856, by 464,119 acres, without reckoning the great area in the Eastern
Counties which was transformed from rabbit warrens and poor pastures into
magnificent corn-fields. It has already been seen that, at the same time, the
total number of persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the actual
agricultural labourers of both sexes and of all ages are concerned, their
number fell from 1,241,396, in 1851, to 1,163, 217 in 1861. If the English Registrar-General,
therefore, rightly remarks:
“The increase of farmers and farm-labourers, since
1801, bears no kind of proportion ... to the increase of agricultural
produce,”
this disproportion obtains much more for the last period, when a
positive decrease of the agricultural population went hand in hand with
increase of the area under cultivation, with more intensive cultivation,
unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated with the soil, and devoted
to its working, an augmentation in the products of the soil without parallel in
the history of English agriculture, plethoric rent-rolls of landlords, and
growing wealth of the capitalist farmers. If we take this, together with the
swift, unbroken extension of the markets, viz., the towns, and the
reign of Free Trade, then the agricultural labourer was at last, post tot
discrimina rerum, placed in circumstances that ought, secundum
artem, to have made him drunk with happiness.
But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the English
agricultural labourer of today, not to speak of his predecessor in the last
half of the 14th and in the 15th century, but only compared with his
predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has changed for the worse to an extraordinary
extent, that “the peasant has again become a serf,” and a serf
worse fed and worse clothed.
Dr. Julian Hunter, in his epochmaking report on the dwellings of the
agricultural labourers, says:
“The cost of the hind” (a name for the
agricultural labourer, inherited from the time of serfdom) “is fixed at
the lowest possible amount on which he can live ... the supplies of wages and
shelter are not calculated on the profit to be derived from him. He is a zero
in farming calculations ... The means [of subsistence] being always supposed to
be a fixed quantity. As to any
further reduction of his income, he may say, nihil habeo nihil curo.
He has no fears for the future, because he has now only the spare supply
necessary to keep him. He has reached the zero from which are dated the
calculations of the farmer. Come what will, he has no share either in
prosperity or adversity.”
In the year 1863, an official inquiry took place into the conditions of
nourishment and labour of the criminals condemned to transportation and penal
servitude. The results are recorded in two voluminous Blue books. Among other
things it is said:
“From an elaborate comparison between the diet of
convicts in the convict prisons in England, and that of paupers in workhouses
and of free labourers in the same country ... it certainly appears that the
former are much better fed than either of the two other classes,” 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.”
A few characteristic depositions of
witnesses: John Smith, governor of the Edinburgh prison, deposes:
No. 5056. “The diet of the English prisons [is]
superior to that of ordinary labourers in England.” No 50. “It is
the fact ... that the ordinary agricultural labourers in Scotland very seldom
get any meat at all.” Answer No. 3047. “Is there anything that you
are aware of to account for the necessity of feeding them very much better than
ordinary labourers? — Certainly not.” No. 3048. “Do you think
that further experiments ought to be made in order to ascertain whether a
dietary might not be hit upon for prisoners employed on public works nearly
approaching to the dietary of free labourers? ...” “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.’”
From the tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled
the annexed comparative summary.
WEEKLY AMOUNT OF NUTRIENTS
Quantity Of
Nitrogenous
Ingredients
Quantity Of
Non-Nitro-
genous In-
gredients
Quantity Of
Mineral
Matter
TOTAL
Ounces
Ounces
Ounces
Ounces
Portland (convict)
28.95
150.06
4.68
183.69
Sailor in the Navy
29.63
152.91
4.52
187.06
Soldier
25.55
114.49
3.94
143.98
Working Coachmaker
24.53
162.06
4.23
190.82
Compositor
21.24
100.83
3.12
125.19
Agricultural labourer
17.73
118.06
3.29
139.08
The general result of the inquiry by the medical commission of 1863 on the
food of the lowest fed classes, is already known to the reader. He will
remember that the diet of a great part of the agricultural labourers’
families is below the minimum necessary “to arrest starvation
diseases.” This is especially the case in all the purely rural districts
of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wilts, Stafford, Oxford, Berks, and Herts.
“The nourishment obtained by the labourer
himself,” says Dr. E. Smith, “is larger than the average quantity
indicates, since he eats a larger share ... necessary to enable him to perform
his labour ... of food than the other members of the family, including in the
poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon.... The quantity of food
obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period of rapid growth, is
in many cases, in almost every county, deficient, and particularly in
nitrogen.”
The male and female servants living with the farmers
themselves are sufficiently nourished. Their number fell from 288,277 in 1851,
to 204,962 in 1861.
“The labour of women in the fields,” says Dr.
Smith, “whatever may be its disadvantages, ... is under present
circumstances of great advantage to the family, since it adds that amount of
income which ... provides shoes and clothing and pays the rent, and thus
enables the family to be better fed.”
One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was that the agricultural
labourer of England, as compared with other parts of the United Kingdom,
“is considerably the worst fed,” as the appended table shows:
Quantities of Carbon and Nitrogen weekly consumed by an average agricultural
adult:
Carbon,
grains
Nitrogen,
grains
England
46,673
1,594
Wales
48,354
2,031
Scotland
48,980
2,348
Ireland
43,366
2,434
“To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of
the house accommodation generally had,” says Dr. Simon, in his official
Health Report, “by our agricultural labourers, almost every page of Dr.
Hunter’s report bears testimony. And gradually, for many years past, the
state of the labourer in these respects has been deteriorating, house-room
being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and, when found, greatly less
suitable to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been the case.
Especially within the last twenty or thirty years, the evil has been in very
rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the
highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches,
see fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly
helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the land which he
contributes to till, whether the house-room which he gets shall be human or
swinish, whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly
lessens the pressure of his poverty — all this does not depend on his
willingness and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he
requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make of their
‘right to do as they will with their own.’ However large may be a
farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of labourers’ dwellings
(much less of decent dwellings) shall be
upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that
soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain.... An extraneous
element weighs the balance heavily against him ... the influence of the Poor
Law in its provisions concerning settlement and chargeability. Under this influence, each parish
has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident
labourers: — for, unhappily, agricultural labour instead of implying a
safe and permanent independence for the hardworking labourer and his family,
implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual
pauperism — a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so near, that
any illness or temporary failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse
to parochial relief — and thus all residence of agricultural population
in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor-rates .... Large proprietors
... have but to resolve that
there shall be no labourers’ dwellings on their estates, and their
estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsibility for
the poor. How far it has been intended, in the English
constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in
land should be acquirable, and that a landlord ‘doing as he wills with
his own,’ should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens,
whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to
discuss.... For that (power) of eviction ... does not exist only in theory. On
a very large scale it prevails in practice — prevails ... as a main
governing condition in the household circumstances of agricultural labour....
As regards the extent of the evil, it may suffice to refer to the evidence
which Dr. Hunter has compiled from the last census, that destruction of houses,
notwithstanding increased local demands for them, had, during the last ten
years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes or townships of England, so
that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to become non-resident (that
is in the parishes in which they work), these parishes and
townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population 5 1/3 per
cent. greater, into houseroom 4½ per cent. less... When the process of
depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr. Hunter, is a
show-village where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but
persons who are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers, are allowed to
live; regular servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class.
But the land requires
cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed upon it are not
the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open village,
perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received them
when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things
are tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand, testify, in
their unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are
doomed. They are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While
the shelter holds together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad
enough he will often be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no
repair, no improvement shall it receive, except such as its penniless occupants
can supply. And when at last it becomes quite uninhabitable —
uninhabitable even to the humblest standard of serfdom — it will be but
one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will be somewhat lightened.
While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates through the
depopulation of lands over which they have control, the nearest town or open
village receive the evicted labourers: the nearest, I say, but this
“nearest” may mean three or four miles distant from the farm where
the labourer has his daily toil. To that daily toil there will then have to be
added, as though it were nothing, the daily need of walking six or eight miles
for power of earning his bread. And whatever farmwork is done by his wife and
children, is done at the same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil
which the distance occasions him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy
scraps of land, which they throng as
densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And into those
wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the open country, have some of
the worst features of the worst town residences) crowd the agricultural
labourers of England. ....
Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the labourer is housed
upon the lands which he cultivates, his household circumstances are generally
such as his life of productive industry would seem to deserve. Even on princely
estates ... his cottage ... may be of the meanest description. There are
landlords who deem any stye good enough for their labourer and his family, and
who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent.
It may be but a ruinous
one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water
supply but the ditch, no garden — but the labourer is helpless against
the wrong.... And the Nuisances Removal Acts ... are ... a mere dead letter ...
in great part dependent for their working on such cottage-owners as the one
from whom his (the labourer’s) hovel is rented.... From brighter, but
exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice, that attention
should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts which are a
reproach to the civilisation of England. Lamentable indeed, must be the case,
when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the
present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that
even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than
their mere numerical insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of rural
labourers’ dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to
persons who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and
moral life. For, again and again in phrases so uniform that they seem
stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic disease in rural districts,
have insisted on the extreme importance of that over-crowding, as an influence
which renders it a quite hopeless task, to attempt the limiting of any
infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been pointed out
that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences which there are in country
life, the crowding which so favours the extension of contagious disease, also
favours the origination of disease which is not contagious. And those who have
denounced the over-crowded state of our rural population have not been silent
as to a further mischief. Even where their primary concern has been only with
the injury to health, often almost perforce they have referred to other
relations on the subject. In showing how frequently it happens that adult
persons of both sexes, married and unmarried, are huddled together in single
small sleeping rooms, their reports have carried the conviction that, under the circumstances they describe,
decency must always be outraged, and morality almost of necessity must suffer.
Thus, for instance, in the
appendix of my last annual report, Dr. Ord, reporting on an outbreak of fever
at Wing, in Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who had come thither from
Wingrave with fever, “in the first days of his illness slept in a room
with nine other persons. Within a fortnight several of these persons were
attacked, and in the course of a few weeks five out of the nine had fever, and
one died...” From Dr. Harvey, of St. George’s Hospital, who, on
private professional business, visited Wing during the time of the epidemic, I
received information exactly in the sense of the above report.... “A
young woman having fever, lay at night in a room occupied by her father and
mother, her bastard child, two young men (her brothers), and her two sisters,
each with a bastard child — 10 persons in all. A few weeks ago 13 persons
slept in it.”
Dr. Hunter investigated 5,375 cottages of agricultural labourers, not only
in the purely agricultural districts, but in all counties of England. Of these,
2,195 had only one bedroom (often at the same time used as living-room), 2,930
only two, and 250, more than two. I will give a few specimens culled from a
dozen counties.
(1.) Bedfordshire
Wrestlingworth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, although
many are smaller than this. The small, one-storied cots are often divided by
partitions into two bedrooms, one bed frequently in a kitchen, 5 feet 6 inches
in height. Rent, £3 a year. The tenants have to make their own privies, the
landlord only supplies a hole. As soon as one has made a privy, it is made use
of by the whole neighbourhood. One house, belonging to a family called
Richardson, was of quite unapproachable beauty. “Its plaster walls bulged
very like a lady’s dress in a curtsey. One gable end was convex, the
other concave, and on this last, unfortunately, stood the chimney, a curved
tube of clay and wood like an elephant’s trunk. A long stick served as
prop to prevent the chimney from falling. The doorway and window were
rhomboidal.” Of 17 houses visited, only 4 had more than one bedroom, and
those four overcrowded. The cots with one bedroom sheltered 3 adults and 3
children, a married couple with 6 children, &c.
Dunton. High rents, from £4 to £5; weekly wages of the man, 10s.
They hope to pay the rent by the straw-plaiting of the family. The higher the
rent, the greater the number that must work together to pay it. Six adults,
living with 4 children in one sleeping apartment, pay £3 10s. for it. The
cheapest house in Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad, let for £3. Only
one of the houses investigated had 2 bedrooms. A little outside the village, a
house whose “tenants dunged against the house-side,” the lower 9
inches of the door eaten away through sheer rottenness; the doorway, a single
opening closed at night by a few bricks, ingeniously pushed up after shutting
and covered with some matting. Half a window, with glass and frame, had gone
the way of all flesh. Here, without furniture, huddled together were 3 adults
and 5 children. Dunton is not worse than the rest of Biggleswade Union.
(2.) Berkshire
Beenham. In June, 1864, a man, his wife and 4 children lived in a
cot (one-storied cottage). A daughter came home from service with scarlet
fever. She died. One child sickened and died. The mother and one child were
down with typhus when Dr. Hunter was called in. The father and one child slept
outside, but the difficulty of securing isolation was seen here, for in the
crowded market of the miserable village lay the linen of the fever-stricken
household, waiting for the wash. The rent of H.’s house, 1s. a-week; one
bedroom for man, wife, and 6 children. One house let for 8d. a-week, 14 feet 6
inches long, 7 feet broad, kitchen, 6 feet high; the bedroom without window,
fire-place, door, or opening, except into the lobby; no garden. A man lived
here for a little while, with two grown-up daughters and one grown-up son;
father and son slept on the bed, the girls in the passage. Each of the latter
had a child while the family was living here, but one went to the workhouse for
her confinement and then came home.
(3.) Buckinghamshire
30 cottages — on 1,000 acres of land — contained here about
130-140 persons. The parish of Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres; it
numbered, in 1851, 36 houses and a population of 84 males and 54 females. This
inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in 1861, when they numbered 98
males and 87 females; increase in 10 years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile,
the number of houses was one less.
Winslow. Great part of this newly built in good style; demand for
houses appears very marked, since very miserable cots let at 1s. to 1s. 3d. per
week.
Water Eaton. Here the landlords, in view of the increasing
population, have destroyed about 20 per cent. of the existing houses. A poor
labourer, who had to go about 4 miles to his work, answered the question,
whether he could not find a cot nearer: “No; they know better than to
take a man in with my large family.”
Tinker’s End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were 4 adults
and 4 children; 11 feet long, 9 feet broad, 6 feet 5 inches high at its highest
part; another 11 feet 3 inches by 9 feet, 5 feet 10 inches high, sheltered 6
persons. Each of these families had less space than is considered necessary for
a convict. No house had more than one bedroom, not one of them a back-door;
water very scarce; weekly rent from 1s. 4d. to 2s. In 16 of the houses visited,
only 1 man that earned 10s. a-week. The quantity of air for each person under
the circumstances just described corresponds to that which he would have if he
were shut up in a box of 4 feet measuring each way, the whole night. But then,
the ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional ventilation.
(4.) Cambridgeshire
Gamblingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the
wretchedest cots to be found anywhere. Much straw-plaiting. “A deadly
lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth,” reigns in Gamblingay.
The neglect in its centre, becomes mortification at its extremities, north and
south, where the houses are rotting to pieces. The absentee landlords bleed
this poor rookery too freely. The rents are very high; 8 or 9 persons packed in
one sleeping apartment, in 2 cases 6 adults, each with 1 or 2 children in one
small bedroom.
(5.) Essex
In this county, diminutions in the number of persons and of cottages go, in
many parishes, hand in hand. In not less than 22 parishes, however, the
destruction of houses has not prevented increase of population, or has not
brought about that expulsion which, under the name “migration to
towns,” generally occurs. In Fingringhoe, a parish of 3,443 acres, were
in 1851, 145 houses; in 1861, only 110. But the people did not wish to go away,
and managed even to increase under these circumstances. In 1851, 252 persons
inhabited 61 houses, but in 1861, 262 persons were squeezed into 49 houses. In
Basilden, in 1851, 157 persons lived on 1,827 acres, in 35 houses; at the end
of ten years, 180 persons in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South
Fambridge, Widford, Basilden, and Ramsden Crags, in 1851, 1,392 persons were
living on 8,449 acres in 316 houses; in 1861, on the same area, 1,473 persons
in 249 houses.
(6.) Herefordshire
This little county has suffered more from the “eviction-spirit”
than any other in England. At Nadby, overcrowded cottages generally, with only
2 bedrooms, belonging for the most part to the farmers. They easily let them
for £3 or £4 a-year, and paid a weekly wage of 9s.
(7.) Huntingdon
Hartford had, in 1851, 87 houses; shortly after this, 19 cottages
were destroyed in this small parish of 1,720 acres; population in 1831, 452; in
1852, 382; and in 1861, 341. 14 cottages, each with 1 bedroom, were visited. In
one, a married couple, 3 grown-up sons, 1 grown-up daughter, 4 children —
in all 10 in another, 3 adults, 6 children. One of these rooms, in which 8
people slept, was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2 inches broad, 6 feet 9
inches high: the average, without making any deduction for projections into the
apartment, gave about 130 cubic feet per head. In the 14 sleeping rooms, 34
adults and 33 children. These cottages are seldom provided with gardens, but
many of the inmates are able to farm small allotments at 10s. or 12s. per rood.
These allotments are at a distance from the houses, which are without privies.
The family “must either go to the allotment to deposit their
ordures,” or, as happens in this place, saving your presence, “use
a closet with a trough set like a drawer in a chest of drawers, and drawn out
weekly and conveyed to the allotment to be emptied where its contents were
wanted.” In Japan, the circle of life-conditions moves more decently than
this.
(8.) Lincolnshire
Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright’s house, with his wife,
her mother, and 5 children; the house has a front kitchen, scullery, bedroom
over the front kitchen; front kitchen and bedroom, 12 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5
inches; the whole ground floor, 21 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The
bedroom is a garret: the walls run together into the roof like a sugar-loaf, a
dormer-window opening in front. “Why did he live here? On account of the
garden? No; it is very small. Rent? High, 1s. 3d. per week. Near his work? No;
6 miles away, so that he walks daily, to and fro, 12 miles. He lived there,
because it was a tenantable cot,” and because he wanted to have a cot for
himself alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The following are
the statistics of 12 houses in Langtoft, with 12 bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36
children.
TWELVE HOUSES IN LANGTOFT
House
No. 1.
No. 2.
No. 3.
No. 4.
No. 5.
No. 6.
No. 7.
No. 8.
No. 9.
No. 10.
No. 11.
No. 12.
Bedrooms.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Adults.
3
4
4
5
2
5
3
3
2
2
3
2
Children.
5
3
4
4
2
3
3
2
0
3
3
4
Number of Persons.
8
7
8
9
4
8
6
5
2
.5
6
6
(9.) Kent
Kennington, very seriously over-populated in 1859, when diphtheria
appeared, and the parish doctor instituted a medical inquiry into the condition
of the poorer classes. He found that in this locality, where much labour is
employed, various cots had been destroyed and no new ones built. In one
district stood four houses, named birdcages; each had 4 rooms of the following
dimensions in feet and inches:
Kitchen:
9 ft. 5  by  8 ft. 11  by  6 ft. 6
Scullery:
8 ft. 6  by  4 ft.  6  by  6 ft. 6
Bedroom:
8 ft. 5  by  5 ft. 10  by  6 ft. 3
Bedroom:
8 ft. 3  by  8 ft.  4  by  6 ft. 3
(10.) Northamptonshire
Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the winter
20-30 men were lounging about the streets from want of work. The farmers do not
always till sufficiently the corn and turnip lands, and the landlord has found
it best to throw all his farms together into 2 or 3. Hence want of employment.
Whilst on one side of the wall, the land calls for labour, on the other side
the defrauded labourers are casting at it longing glances. Feverishly
overworked in summer, and half-starved in winter, it is no wonder if they say
in their peculiar dialect, “the parson and gentlefolk seem frit to death
at them.”
At Floore, instances, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of couples with
4, 5, 6 children; 3 adults with 5 children; a couple with grandfather and 6
children down with scarlet fever, &c.; in two houses with two bedrooms, two
families of 8 and 9 adults respectively.
(11.) Wiltshire
Stratton. 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom. Pentill, in
the same parish: a cot let at Is. 3d. weekly with 4 adults and 4 children, had
nothing good about it, except the walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of
stones to the roof of worn-out thatch.
(12.) Worcestershire
House-destruction here not quite so excessive; yet from 1851 to 1861, the
number of inhabitants to each house on the average, has risen from 4.2 to 4.6.
Badsey. Many cots and little gardens here. Some of the farmers
declare that the cots are “a great nuisance here, because they bring the
poor.” On the statement of one gentleman:
“The poor are none the better for them; if you build
500 they will let fast enough, in fact, the more you build, the more they
want”
(according to him the houses give birth to the inhabitants, who then by a
law of Nature press on “the means of housing”). Dr. Hunter
remarks:
“Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as there
is no particular attraction, such as doles, at Badsey, it must be repulsion
from some other unfit place, which will send them here. If each could find an
allotment near his work, he would not prefer Badsey, where he pays for his
scrap of ground twice as much as the farmer pays for his.”
The continual emigration to the towns, the continual formation of surplus
population in the country through the concentration of farms, conversion of
arable land into pasture, machinery, &c., and the continual eviction of the
agricultural population by the destruction of their cottages, go hand in hand.
The more empty the district is of men, the greater is its “relative
surplus population,” the greater is their pressure on
the means of employment, the greater is the absolute excess of the agricultural
population over the means for housing it, the greater, therefore, in the
villages is the local surplus population and the most pestilential packing
together of human beings. The packing together of knots of men in scattered
little villages and small country towns corresponds to the forcible draining of
men from the surface of the land. The continuous superseding of the
agricultural labourers, in spite of their diminishing number and the increasing
mass of their products, gives birth to their pauperism. Their pauperism is
ultimately a motive to their eviction and the chief source of their miserable
housing which breaks down their last power of resistance, and makes them more
slaves of the landed proprietors and the farmers. 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, &c., is most marked. It is
to be seen everywhere, in harvest-time as well as in spring and summer, at
those frequently recurring times when English agriculture, so careful and
intensive, wants extra hands. There are always too many agricultural labourers
for the ordinary, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs of
the cultivation of the soil.
Hence we find in the official documents contradictory
complaints from the same places of deficiency and excess of labour
simultaneously. The temporary or local want of labour brings about no rise in
wages, but a forcing of the women and children into the fields, and
exploitation at an age constantly lowered. As soon as the exploitation of the
women and children takes place on a larger scale, it becomes in turn a new
means of making a surplus population of the male agricultural labourer and of
keeping down his wage. In the east of England thrives a beautiful fruit of this
vicious circle — the so-called gang-system, to which I must
briefly return here.
The gang-system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of Lincoln,
Huntingdon, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottingham, here and there in the
neighbouring counties of Northampton, Bedford, and Rutland. Lincolnshire will
serve us as an example. A large part of this county is new land, marsh
formerly, or even, as in others of the eastern counties just named, won lately
from the sea. The steam-engine has worked wonders in the way of drainage. What
were once fens and sandbanks, bear now a luxuriant sea of corn and the highest
of rents. The same thing holds of the alluvial lands won by human endeavour, as
in the island of Axholme and other parishes on the banks of the Trent. In
proportion as the new farms arose, not only were no new cottages built: old
ones were demolished, and the supply of labour had to come from open villages,
miles away, by long roads that wound along the sides of the hills. There alone
had the population formerly found shelter from the incessant floods of the
winter-time. The labourers that dwell on the farms of 400-1,000 acres (they are called “confined labourers”) are solely
employed on such kinds of agricultural work as is permanent, difficult, and
carried on by aid of horses. For every 100 acres there is, on an average,
scarcely one cottage. A fen farmer, e.g., gave evidence before the Commission
of Inquiry:
“I farm 320 acres, all arable land. I have not one
cottage on my farm. I have only one labourer on my farm now. I have four
horsemen lodging about. We get light work done by gangs.”
The soil requires much light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain
processes of manuring, removing of stones, &c. This is done by the gangs,
or organised bands that dwell in the open villages.
The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both
sexes (13-18 years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated
at the age of 13), and children of both sexes (6-13 years of age). At the head
is the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is
called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of
enterprise and savoir-faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the
gang, which works under him, not under the farmer. He generally arranges with
the latter for piece-work, and his income, which on the average is not very
much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer, depends almost entirely upon the
dexterity with which he manages to extract within the shortest time
the greatest possible amount of labour from his gang. The farmers have
discovered that women work steadily only under the direction of men, but that
women and children, once set going, impetuously spend their life-force —
as Fourier knew — while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to
economise his as much as he can. The gang-master goes from one farm to another,
and thus employs his gang from 6 to 8 months in the year. Employment by him is,
therefore, much more lucrative and more certain for the labouring families,
than employment by the individual farmer, who only employs children
occasionally. This circumstance so completely rivets his influence in the open
villages that children are generally only to be hired through his
instrumentality. The lending out of these individually, independently of the
gang, is his second trade.
The “drawbacks” of the system are the overwork of the children
and young persons, the enormous marches that they make daily to and from the
farms, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 miles distant, finally, the demoralisation of the
gang. Although the gang-master, who, in some districts is called “the
driver,” is armed with a long stick, he uses it but seldom, and
complaints of brutal treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic emperor, or
a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular with his
subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the gipsy life under
his direction. Coarse freedom, a noisy jollity, and obscenest impudence give
attractions to the gang. Generally the gangmaster pays up in a public house;
then he returns home at the head of the procession reeling drunk, propped up
right and left by a stalwart virago, while children and young persons bring up
the rear, boisterous, and singing chaffing and bawdy songs. On the return
journey what Fourier calls “phanerogamie,” is the order of the day.
The getting with child of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions of the
same age, is common. The open villages which supply the contingent of the gang,
become Sodoms and Gomorrahs,
and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the
kingdom. The moral character of girls bred in these schools, when married
women, was shown above. Their children, when opium does not give them the
finishing stroke, are born recruits of the gang.
The gang in its classical form just described, is called the public, common,
or tramping gang. For there are also private gangs. These are made up in the
same way as the common gang, but count fewer members, and work, not under a
gang-master, but under some old farm servant, whom the farmer does
not know how to employ in any better way. The gipsy fun has vanished here, but
according to all witnesses, the payment and treatment of the children is worse.
The gang-system, which during the last years has steadily increased, clearly does not exist for the
sake of the gang-master. It exists for the enrichment of the large farmers,
and indirectly of the
landlords. 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.” From the exposition already
made, it will be understood why, on the one hand, a greater or less lack of
employment for the agricultural labourer is admitted, while on the other, the
gang-system is at the same time declared “necessary” on account of
the want of adult male labour and its migration to the towns. The cleanly weeded land, and the
uncleanly human weeds, of Lincolnshire, are pole and counterpole of
capitalistic production.
F. Ireland
In concluding this section, we must travel for a moment to Ireland. First,
the main facts of the case.
The population of Ireland had, in 1841, reached 8,222,664; in 1851, it had
dwindled to 6,623,985; in 1861, to 5,850,309; in 1866, to 5½ millions, nearly
to its level in 1801. The diminution began with the famine year, 1846, so that
Ireland, in less than twenty years, lost more than 5/16 ths of its people. Its total emigration from May,
1851, to July, 1865, numbered 1,591,487: the emigration during the years
1861-1865 was more than half-a-million. The number of inhabited houses fell,
from 1851-1861, by 52,990. From 1851-1861, the number of holdings of 15 to 30
acres increased 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres, 109,000, whilst the
total number of all farms fell 120,000, a fall, therefore, solely due to the
suppression of farms under 15 acres — i.e., to their
centralisation.
Table A
LIVE-STOCK
Year
Horses
Cattle
Sheep
Pigs
Total
Number
Decrease
Total
Number
Decrease
Increase
Total
Number
Decrease
Increase
Total
Number
Decrease
Increase
1860
619,811
—
3,606,374
—
—
3,542,080
—
—
1,271,072
—
—
1861
614,232
5,579
3,471,688
134,686
—
3,556,050
—
13,970
1,102,042
169,030
—
1862
602,894
11,338
3,254,890
216,798
—
3,456,132
99,918
—
1,154,324
—
52,282
1863
579,978
22,916
3,144,231
110,659
—
3,308,204
147,982
—
1,067,458
86,866
—
1864
562,158
17,820
3,262,294
—
118,063
3,366,941
—
58,737
1,058,480
8,978
—
1865
547,867
14,291
3,493,414
—
231,120
3,688,742
—
321,801
1,299,893
—
241,413
The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a decrease in
the mass of products. For our purpose, it suffices to consider the 5 years from
1861-1865 during which over half-a-million emigrated, and the absolute number
of people sank by more than 1/3 of a million. From the above table it results:
—
Horses
Cattle
Sheep
Pigs
Absolute Decrease
Absolute Decrease
Absolute Increase
Absolute Increase
71,944
112,960
146,662
28,8211
Let us now turn to agriculture, which yields the means of subsistence for
cattle and for men. In the following table is calculated the
decrease or increase for each separate year, as compared with its
immediate predecessor. The Cereal Crops include wheat, oats, barley, rye,
beans, and peas; the Green Crops, potatoes, turnips, marigolds, beet-root,
cabbages, carrots, parsnips, vetches, &c.
Table B
INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER
CROPS AND GRASS IN ACREAGE
Year
Cereal
Crops
Green
Crops
Grass and
Clover
Flax
Total
Cultivated
Land
Decrease
(Acres)
Decrease
(Acres)
Increase
(Acres)
Decrease
(Acres)
Increase
(Acres)
Decrease
(Acres)
Increase
(Acres)
Decrease
(Acres)
Increase
(Acres)
1861
15,701
36,974
—
47,969
—
—
19,271
81,373
—
1862
72,734
74,785
—
—
6,623
—
2,055
138,841
—
1863
144,719
19,358
—
—
7,724
—
63,922
92,431
—
1864
122,437
2,317
—
—
47,486
—
87,761
—
10,493
1865
72,450
—
25,241
—
68,970
50,159
—
28,398
—
1861-65
428,041
108,193
—
—
82,834
—
122,8501
330,350
—
In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading
“grass land,” chiefly because the area under the heading of
“bog and waste unoccupied,” decreased by 101,543 acres. If we
compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667
qrs., of which 48,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley, &c.: the
decrease in potatoes was 446,398 tons, although the area of their cultivation
increased in 1865.
From the movement of population and the agricultural produce of Ireland, we
pass to the movement in the purse of its landlords, larger farmers, and
industrial capitalists. It is reflected in the rise and fall of the Income-tax.
It may be remembered that Schedule D. (profits with the exception of those of
farmers), includes also the so-called, “professional” profits
— i.e., the incomes of lawyers, doctors, &c.; and the
Schedules C. and E., in which no special details are given, include the incomes
of employees, officers, State sinecurists, State fundholders, &c.
Table C
INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER
CULTIVATION,
PRODUCT PER ACRE, AND TOTAL PRODUCT OF 1865 COMPARED WITH 1864
Product
Acres of
Cultivated Land
Product
per Acre
Total Product
1864
1865
Increase or
Decrease, 1865
1864
1865
Increase or
Decrease, 1865
1864
1865
Increase or
Decrease, 1865
Wheat
276,483
266,989
—
9,494
cwt., 13.3
13.0
—
0.3
875,782 Qrs.
826,783 Qrs.
—
48,999 Qrs.
Oats
1,814,886
1,745,228
—
69,658
cwt., 12.1
12.3
0.2
—
7,826,332 Qrs.
7,659,727 Qrs.
—
166,605 Qrs.
Barley
172,700
177,102
4,402
—
cwt., 15.9
14.9
—
1.0
761,909 Qrs.
732,017 Qrs.
—
29,892 Qrs.
Bere
8,894
10,091
1,197
—
cwt., 16.4
14.8
—
1.6
15,160 Qrs.
13,989 Qrs.
—
1,171 Qrs.
Rye
cwt., 8.5
10.4
1.9
—
12,680 Qrs.
18,314 Qrs.
5,684 Qrs.
—
Potatoes
1,039,724
1,066,260
26,536
—
tons, 4.1
3.6
—
0.5
4,312,388 ts.
3,865,990 ts.
—
446,398 ts.
Turnips
337,355
334,212
—
3,143
tons, 10.3
9.9
—
0.4
3,467,659 ts.
3,301,683 ts.
—
165,976 ts.
Mangold-
wurzel
14,073
14,389
316
—
tons, 10.5
13.3
2.8
—
147,284 ts.
191,937 ts.
44,653 ts.
—
Cabbages
31,821
33,622
1,801
—
tons, 9.3
10.4
1.1
—
297,375 ts.
350,252 ts.
52,877 ts.
—
Flax
301,693
251,433
—
50,260
st. (14 lb.) 34.2
25.2
—
9.0
64,506 st.
39,561 st.
—
24,945 st.
Hay
1,609,569
1,678,493
68,9241
—
tons, 1.6
1.8
0.2
—
2,607,153 ts.
3,068,707 ts.
461,554 ts.
—
Table D
THE INCOME-TAX ON THE SUBJOINED INCOMES
IN POUNDS STERLING
(Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Lond. 1866.)
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
Schedule A.
Rent of Land
13,893,829
13,003,554
13,398,938
13,494,091
13,470,700
13,801,616
Schedule B.
Farmers’ Profits.
2,765,387
2,773,644
2,937,899
2,938,923
2,930,874
2,946,072
Schedule D.
Industrial,
&c., Profits
4,891,652
4,836,203
4,858,800
4,846,497
4,546,147
4,850,199
Total Schedules
A to E
22,962,885
22,998,394
23,597,574
23,658,631
23,236,298
23,930,340
Under Schedule D., the average annual increase of income from 1853-1864 was
only 0.93; whilst, in the same period, in Great Britain, it was 4.58. The
following table shows the distribution of the profits (with the exception of
those of farmers) for the years 1864 and 1865: —
Table E
SCHEDULE D.
INCOME FROM PROFITS (OVER £6O) IN IRELAND
1864
£
1865
£
Total yearly
income of
4,368,610 divided
among 17,467 persons.
4,669,979 divided
among 18,081 persons.
Yearly income
over £60
and under £100
238,726 divided
among 5,015 persons.
222,575 divided
among 4,703 persons.
Of the yearly
total income
1,979,066 divided
among 11,321 persons.
2,028,571 divided
among 12,184 persons.
Remainder of the
total yearly income
2,150,818 divided
among 1,131 persons.
2,418,833 divided
among 1,194 persons.
Of
these
1,073,906 divided
among 1,010 persons.
1,097,927 divided
among 1,044 persons.
1,076,912 divided
among 121 persons.
1,320,906 divided
among 150 persons.
430,535 divided
among 95 persons.
584,458 divided
among 2 persons.
646,377 divided
among 26
736,448 divided
among 28
262,819 divided
among 3
274,528 divided
among 3
England, a country with fully developed capitalist production, and
pre-eminently industrial, would have bled to death with such a drain of
population as Ireland has suffered. But Ireland is at present only an
agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country
to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.
The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation,
has greatly diminished the produce of the soil, and, in spite of the greater area devoted to
cattle breeding, has brought about, in some of its branches, an absolute
diminution, in others, an advance scarcely worthy of mention, and constantly
interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, with the fall in numbers of the
population, rents and farmers’ profits rose, although the latter not as
steadily as the former. The reason of this is easily comprehensible. On the one
hand, with the throwing of small holdings into large ones, and the change of
arable into pasture land, a larger part of the whole produce was transformed
into surplus-produce. The surplus-produce increased, although the total
produce, of which it formed a fraction, decreased. On the other hand, the money
value of this surplus-produce increased yet more rapidly than its mass, in
consequence of the rise in the English market price of meat, wool, &c.,
during the last 20, and especially during the last 10, years.
The scattered means of production that serve the producers themselves as
means of employment and of subsistence, without expanding their own value by
the incorporation of the labour of others, are no more capital than a product
consumed by its own producer is a commodity. If, with the mass of the
population, that of the means of production employed in agriculture also
diminished, the mass of the capital employed in agriculture increased, because
a part of the means of production that were formerly scattered, was
concentrated and turned into capital.
The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in industry and
trade, accumulated during the last two decades slowly, and with great and
constantly recurring fluctuations; so much the more rapidly did the
concentration of its individual constituents develop. And, however small its
absolute increase, in proportion to the dwindling population it had increased
largely.
Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a process is revealed,
than which nothing more excellent could be wished for by orthodox economy for
the support of its dogma: that misery springs from absolute surplus population,
and that equilibrium is re-established by depopulation. This is a far more
important experiment than was the plague in the middle of the 14th century so
belauded of Malthusians. Note further: If only the naïveté of the schoolmaster
could apply, to the conditions of production and population of the nineteenth
century, the standard of the 14th, this naïveté, into the bargain, overlooked
the fact that whilst, after the plague and the decimation that accompanied it,
followed on this side of the Channel, in England, enfranchisement and
enrichment of the agricultural population, on that side, in France, followed
greater servitude and more misery.
The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed
poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.
The exodus of the next 20 years, an exodus still constantly increasing, did
not, as, e.g., the Thirty Years’ War, decimate, along with the
human beings, their means of production. Irish genius discovered an altogether
new way of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of
its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United States, send home sums of
money every year as travelling expenses for those left behind. Every troop that
emigrates one year, draws another after it the next. Thus, instead of costing
Ireland anything, emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches
of its export trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply
make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more
people than are replaced by the births, so that the absolute level of the
population falls year by year.
What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed
from the surplus population? That the relative surplus population is today as
great as before 1846; that wages are just as low, that the oppression of the
labourers has increased, that misery is forcing the country towards a new
crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture
has kept pace with emigration. The production of relative surplus population
has more than kept pace with the absolute depopulation. A glance at table C.
shows that the change of arable to pasture land must work yet more acutely in
Ireland than in England. In England the cultivation of green crops increases
with the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. Whilst a large number of
acres, that were formerly tilled, lie idle or are turned permanently into
grass-land, a great part of the waste land and peat bogs that were unused
formerly, become of service for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller
and medium farmers — I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more
than 100 acres — still make up about 8/10ths of the whole number. They are one after the other, and
with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an
agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually furnish new
recruits to the class of wage labourers. The one great industry of Ireland,
linen-manufacture, requires relatively few adult men and only employs
altogether, in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton rose in
1861-1866, a comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like all other
great modern industries, it constantly produces, by incessant fluctuations, a
relative surplus population within its own sphere, even with an absolute
increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it. The misery of the
agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories, whose
armies of labourers are, for the most part, scattered over the country. Here,
we encounter again the system described above of domestic industry, which in
underpayment and 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 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). Officials of a government which
is maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege, now open, now
disguised, they have to observe all the precautions of language that their
colleagues in England disdain. In spite of this, however, they do not let their
government cradle itself in illusions. According to them the rate of wages in
the country, still very low, has within the last 20 years risen 50-60 per
cent., and stands now, on the average, at 6s. to 9s. per week. But behind this
apparent rise, is hidden an actual fall in wages, for it does not correspond at
all to the rise in price of the necessary means of subsistence that has taken
place in the meantime. For proof, the following extract from the official
accounts of an Irish workhouse.
AVERAGE WEEKLY COST PER HEAD
Year ended
Provisions and
Necessaries.
Clothing.
TOTAL.
29th Sept., 1849.
1s. 3 1/4d.
3d.
1s. 6 1/4d.
29th Sept., 1869.
2s. 7 1/4d.
6d.
3s. 1 1/4d.
The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore fully twice,
and that of clothing exactly twice, as much as they were 20 years before.
Even apart from this disproportion, the mere comparison of the rate of wages
expressed in gold would give a result far from accurate. Before the famine, the
great mass of agricultural wages were paid in kind, only the smallest part in
money; today, payment in money is the rule. From this it follows that, whatever
the amount of the real wage, its money rate must rise.
“Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin
... with a rood, or half-acre or acre of land, and facilities for ... a crop
of potatoes. He was able to rear his pig and keep fowl.... But they now have to
buy bread, and they have no refuse upon which they can feed a pig or fowl, and
they have consequently no benefit from the sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs.”

In fact, formerly, the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the
small farmers, and formed for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the medium
and large farms on which they found employment. Only since the catastrophe of
1846 have they begun to form a fraction of the class of purely wage labourers,
a special class, connected with its wage-masters only by monetary relations.
We know what were the conditions of their dwellings in 1846. Since then they
have grown yet worse. A part of the agricultural labourers, which, however,
grows less day by day, dwells still on the holdings of the farmers in
over-crowded huts, whose hideousness far surpasses the worst that the English
agricultural labourers offered us in this way. And this holds generally with
the exception of certain tracts of Ulster; in the south, in the counties of
Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, &c.; in the east, in Wicklow, Wexford, &c.;
in the centre of Ireland, in King’s and Queen’s County, Dublin,
&c.; in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, &c.
“The agricultural labourers’ huts,” an
inspector cries out, “are a disgrace to the Christianity and to the
civilisation of this country.”
In order to increase the attractions of these holes for the labourers, the
pieces of land belonging thereto from time immemorial, are systematically
confiscated.
“The mere sense that they exist subject to this species
of ban, on the part of the landlords and their agents, has ... given birth in
the minds of the labourers to corresponding sentiments of antagonism and
dissatisfaction towards those by whom they are thus led to regard themselves as
being treated as ... a proscribed race.”
The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts
situated on the field of labour. This was done on the largest scale, and as if
in obedience to a command from on high. Thus many labourers were compelled to
seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into
garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums. Thousands of Irish
families, who according to the testimony of the English, eaten up as these are
with national prejudice, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic
hearth, for their gaiety and the purity of their home-life, found themselves
suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now obliged to seek
work of the neighbouring farmers and are only hired by the day, and therefore
under the most precarious form of wage. Hence
“they sometimes have long distances to go to
and from work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not unfrequently ending
in sickness, disease and want.”
“ 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, or at such
times as agricultural operations are carried on with activity; at other 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.”
These results of the agricultural revolution — i.e., the
change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous
economy of labour, &c., are still further aggravated by the model
landlords, who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, condescend
to live in Ireland on their demesnes. In order that the law of supply and
demand may not be broken, these gentlemen draw their
“labour-supply ... chiefly from their small tenants,
who are obliged to attend when required to do the landlord’s work, at
rates of wages, in many instances, considerably under the current rates paid to
ordinary labourers, and without regard to the inconvenience or loss to the
tenant of being obliged to neglect his own business at critical periods of
sowing or reaping.”
The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long
duration of gluts of labour, all these symptoms of a relative surplus
population, figure therefore in the reports of the Poor Law administration, as
so many hardships of the agricultural proletariat. It will be remembered that
we met, in the English agricultural proletariat, with a similar spectacle. But
the difference is that in England, an industrial country, the industrial
reserve recruits itself from the country districts, whilst in Ireland, an
agricultural country, the agricultural reserve recruits itself from the towns,
the cities of refuge of the expelled agricultural labourers. In the former,
the supernumeraries of agriculture are transformed into factory
operatives; in the latter, those forced into the towns, whilst at the same time
they press on the wages in towns, remain agricultural labourers, and are
constantly sent back to the country districts in search of work.
The official inspectors sum up the material condition of the agricultural
labourer as follows:
“Though living with the strictest frugality, his own
wages are barely sufficient to provide food for an ordinary family and pay his
rent” and he depends upon other sources for the means of clothing
himself, his wife, and children.... The atmosphere of these cabins, combined
with the other privations they are subjected to, has made this class
particularly susceptible to low fever and pulmonary consumption.”
After this, it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of
the inspectors, a sombre discontent runs through the ranks of this class, that
they long for the return of the past, loathe the present, despair of the
future, give themselves up “to the evil influence of agitators,”
and have only one fixed idea, to emigrate to America. This is the land of
Cockaigne, into which the great Malthusian panacea, depopulation, has
transformed green Erin.
What a happy life the Irish factory operative leads one example will
show:
“On my recent visit to the North of Ireland,”
says the English Factory Inspector, Robert Baker, “I met with the
following evidence of effort in an Irish skilled workman to afford education to
his children; and I give his evidence verbatim, as I took it from his mouth.
That he was a skilled factory hand, may be understood when I say that he was
employed on goods for the Manchester market. ‘Johnson. — I am a
beetler and work from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, from Monday to Friday.
Saturday we leave off at 6 p. m., and get three hours of it (for meals and
rest). I have five children in all. For this work I get 10s. 6d. a week; my
wife works here also, and gets 5s. a week. The oldest girl who is 12, minds the
house. She is also cook, and all the servant we have. She gets the young ones
ready for school. A girl going past the house wakes me at half past five in the
morning. My wife gets up and goes along with me. We get nothing (to eat) before
we come to work. The child of 12 takes care of the little children all the day,
and we get nothing till breakfast at eight. At eight we go home. We get tea once a week; at other times we get stirabout,
sometimes of oat-meal, sometimes of Indian meal, as we are able to get it. In
the winter we get a little sugar and water to our Indian meal. In the summer we
get a few potatoes, planting a small patch ourselves; and when they are done
we get back to stirabout. Sometimes we get a little milk as it may be. So we go
on from day to day, Sunday and week day, always the same the year round. I am
always very much tired when I have done at night. We may see a bit of
flesh meat sometimes, but very seldom. Three of our children attend school, for
whom we pay 1d. a week a head. Our rent is 9d. a week. Peat for firing costs
1s. 6d. a fortnight at the very lowest.’”
Such are Irish wages, such is Irish life!
In fact the misery of Ireland is again the topic of the day in England. At
the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, one of the Irish land magnates, Lord
Dufferin, set about its solution in The Times. “Wie menschlich
von solch grossem Herrn!”
From Table E. we saw that, during 1864, of £4,368,610 of total profits,
three surplus-value makers pocketed only £262,819; that in 1865, however, out
of £4,669,979 total profits, the same three virtuosi of
“abstinence” pocketed £274,528; in 1864, 26 surplus-value makers
reached to £646,377; in 1865, 28 surplus-value makers reached to £736,448; in
1864, 121 surplus-value makers, £1,076,912; in 1865, 150 surplus-value makers,
£1,320,906; in 1864, 1,131 surplus-value makers £2,150,818, nearly half of the
total annual profit; in 1865, 1,194 surplus-value makers, £2,418,833, more than
half of the total annual profit. But the lion’s share, which an
inconceivably small number of land magnates in England, Scotland and Ireland
swallow up of the yearly national rental, is so monstrous that the wisdom of
the English State does not think fit to afford the same statistical materials
about the distribution of rents as about the distribution of profits. Lord
Dufferin is one of those land magnates. That rent-rolls and profits can ever be
“excessive,” or that their plethora is in any way connected with
plethora of the people’s misery is, of course, an idea as
“disreputable” as “unsound.” He keeps to facts. The
fact is that, as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish rent-rolls swell;
that depopulation benefits the landlords, therefore also benefits the soil,
and, therefore, the people, that mere accessory of the soil. He declares,
therefore, that Ireland is still over-populated, and the stream of emigration
still flows too lazily. To be perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least
one-third of a million of labouring men. Let no man imagine that this lord,
poetic into the bargain, is a physician of the school of Sangrado, who as often
as he did not find his patient better, ordered phlebotomy and again phlebotomy,
until the patient lost his sickness at the same time as his blood. Lord
Dufferin demands a new blood-letting of one-third of a million only, instead of
about two millions; in fact, without the getting rid of these, the millennium
in Erin is not to be. The proof is easily given.
NUMBER AND EXTENT OF FARMS IN IRELAND IN
1864
No.
Acres
(1) Farms not
over 1 acre.
48,653
25,394
(2) Farms over 1,
not over 5 acres.
82,037
288,916
(3) Farms over 5,
not over 15 acres.
176,368
1,836,310
(4) Farms over 15,
not over 30 acres.
136,578
3,051,343
(5) Farms over 30,
not over 50 acres.
71,961
2,906,274
(6) Farms over 50,
not over 100 acres.
54,247
3,983,880
(7) Farms over
100 acres.
31,927
8,227,807
(8) TOTAL AREA.
—
26,319,924
Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally farms of the
first three categories, under 1 and not over 15 acres. These above all must
disappear. This gives 307,058 “supernumerary” farmers, and
reckoning the families the low average of 4 persons, 1,228,232 persons. On the
extravagant supposition that, after the agricultural revolution is complete
one-fourth of these are again absorbable, there remain for emigration 921,174
persons. Categories 4, 5, 6, of over 15 and not over 100 acres, are, as was
known long since in England, too small for capitalistic cultivation of corn,
and for sheep-breeding are almost vanishing quantities. On the same supposition
as before, therefore, there are further 788,761 persons to emigrate; total,
1,709,532. And as l’appétit vient en mangeant, Rentroll’s eyes will
soon discover that Ireland, with 3½ millions, is still always miserable, and
miserable because she is 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.”
Like all good things in this bad world, this profitable method has its
drawbacks. With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the
Irish in America keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears
on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen
of the seas rises, threatening and more threatening, the young giant
Republic:
Acerba fata Romanos agunt
Scelusque fraternae necis.
[A cruel fate torments the Romans,
and the crime of fratricide]
Footnotes
1.
Karl Marx, l. c., “A égalité d’oppression des masses, plus un pays
a de prolétaires et plus il est riche.” (Colins, “L’Economie
Politique. Source des Révolutions et des Utopies, prétendues
Socialistes.” Paris, 1857, t. III., p. 331.) Our
“prolétarian” is economically none other than the wage labourer,
who produces and increases capital, and is thrown out on the streets, as soon
as he is superfluous for the needs of aggrandisement of “Monsieur
capital,” as Pecqueur calls this person. “The sickly proletarian of
the primitive forest,” is a pretty Roscherian fancy. The primitive
forester is owner of the primitive forest, and uses the primitive forest as his
property with the freedom of an orang-outang. He is not, therefore, a
proletarian. This would only be the case, if the primitive forest exploited
him, instead of being exploited by him. As far as his health is concerned, such
a man would well bear comparison, not only with the modern proletarian, but
also with the syphilitic and scrofulous upper classes. But, no doubt, Herr
Wilhelm Roscher, by “primitive forest” means his native heath of
Lüneburg.
2.
John Bellers, l. c., p. 2.
3.
Bernard de Mandeville: “The Fable of the Bees,” 5th edition,
London, 1728. Remarks, pp. 212, 213, 328. “Temperate living and constant
employment is the direct road, for the poor, to rational happiness” [by
which he most probably means long working-days and little means of
subsistence], “and to riches and strength for the state”
(viz., for the landlords, capitalists, and their political dignitaries
and agents). (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” London, 1770, p.
54.)
4.
Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are “the civil
institutions"? From his standpoint of juridical illusion, he does not regard
the law as a product of the material relations of production, but conversely
the relations of production as products of the law. Linguet overthrew
Montesquieu’s illusory “Esprit des lois” with one word:
“ L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété.” [The spirit of laws is property]
5.
Eden, l. c., Vol. 1, book I., chapter 1, pp. 1, 2, and preface, p. xx.
6.
If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose “Essay on Population”
appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more
than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart,
Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence
thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due
solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders
in the United Kingdom; the “principle of population,” slowly worked
out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis,
proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings
of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as
the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development. Malthus, hugely
astonished at his success, gave himself to stuffing into his book materials
superficially compiled, and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed
by him. Note further: Although Malthus was a parson of the English State
Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy — one of the conditions
of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University: “Socios
collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem
duxerit socius collegii desinat esse.” (“Reports of Cambridge
University Commission,” p. 172.) This circumstance favourably
distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off
the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, “Be
fruitful and multiply,” as their special Biblical mission in such a
degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really
unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the
“principle of population.” It is characteristic that the economic
fall of man, the Adam’s apple, the urgent appetite, “the checks
which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid,” as Parson Townsend waggishly
puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of
Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the exception of
the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population
theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For instance, Bruckner, “Théorie
du Système animal,” Leyde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern
population theory is exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between
Quesnay and his pupil, the elder Mirabeau, furnished ideas on the same topic;
then Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the
arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of lesser reverend scribblers in
this line. Originally, Political Economy was studied by philosophers like
Hobbes, Locke, Hume; by businessmen and statesmen, like Thomas More, Temple,
Sully, De Witt, North, Law, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Franklin; and especially,
and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon, Mandeville,
Quesnay. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Rev. Mr. Tucker, a
notable economist of his time, excused himself for meddling with the things of
Mammon. Later on, and in truth with this very “Principle of
population,” struck the hour of the Protestant parsons. Petty, who
regarded the population as the basis of wealth, and was, like Adam Smith, an
outspoken foe to parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of their bungling
interference, “that Religion best flourishes when the Priests are most
mortified, as was before said of the Law, which best flourisheth when lawyers
have least to do.” He advises the Protestant priests, therefore, if they,
once for all, will not follow the Apostle Paul and “mortify”
themselves by celibacy, “not to breed more Churchmen than the Benefices,
as they now stand shared out, will receive, that is to say, if there be places
for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe to breed up
24,000 ministers, for then the twelve thousand which are unprovided for, will
seek ways how to get themselves a livelihood, which they cannot do more easily
than by persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do poison or
starve their souls, and misguide them in their way to Heaven.” (Petty:
“A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions,” London, 1667, p. 57.) Adam
Smith’s position with the Protestant priesthood of his time is shown by
the following. In “A Letter to A. Smith, L.L.D. On the Life, Death, and
Philosophy of his Friend, David Hume. By one of the People called
Christians,” 4th Edition, Oxford, 1784, Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich,
reproves Adam Smith, because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan, he
“embalmed his friend David” (sc. Hume); because he told the world
how “Hume amused himself on his deathbed with Lucian and Whist,”
and because he even had the impudence to write of Hume: “I have always
considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as
nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as, perhaps, the
nature of human frailty will permit.” The bishop cries out, in a passion:
“Is it right in you, Sir, to hold up to our view as ‘perfectly wise
and virtuous,’ the character and conduct of one, who seems to
have been possessed with an incurable antipathy to all that is called
Religion; and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress and
extirpate the spirit of it among men, that its very name, if he could effect
it, might no more be had in remembrance?” (l. c., p. 8.) “But let
not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long
continuance.” (P. 17.) Adam Smith, “had the atrocious wickedness to
propagate atheism through the land (viz., by his “Theory of Moral
Sentiments”). Upon the whole, Doctor, your meaning is good; but I think
you will not succeed this time. You would persuade us, by the example of
David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits,
and the proper antidote against the fear of death.... You may smile over
Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his
overthrow in the Red Sea.” (l. c., pp. 21, 22.) One orthodox individual,
amongst Adam Smith’s college friends, writes after his death:
“Smith’s well-placed affection for Hume ... hindered him from being
a Christian.... When he met with honest men whom he liked ... he would believe
almost anything they said. Had he been a friend of the worthy ingenious Horrox
he would have believed that the moon some times disappeared in a clear sky
without the interposition of a cloud.... He approached to republicanism in his
political principles.” (“The Bee.” By James Anderson, 18
Vols., Vol. 3, pp. 166, 165, Edinburgh, 1791-93.) Parson Thomas Chalmers has
his suspicions as to Adam Smith having invented the category of
“unproductive labourers,” solely for the Protestant parsons, in
spite of their blessed work in the vineyard of the Lord.
7.
“The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative and the
labourer is the same; namely, the possibility of the employer realising a
profit on the produce of their industry. If the rate of wages is such
as to reduce the master’s gains below the average profit of capital, he
will cease to employ them, or he will only employ them on condition of
submission to a reduction of wages.” (John Wade, l. c., p. 241.)
8.
Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to the Russian edition: The MS in the
first case says “little” and in the second case “much”;
the correction has been introduced according to the authorised French
translation.
9.
Cf. Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie,” pp. 166,
seq.
10. “If we now return to our first inquiry,
wherein it was shown that capital itself is only the result of human labour...
it seems quite incomprehensible that man can have fallen under the domination
of capital, his own product; can be subordinated to it; and as in reality this
is beyond dispute the case, involuntarily the question arises: How has the
labourer been able to pass from being master of capital — as its creator
— to being its slave?” (Von Thünen, “Der isolierte
Staat” Part ii., Section ii., Rostock, 1863, pp. 5, 6.) It is
Thünen’s merit to have asked this question. His answer is simply
childish.
11. From Adam Smith, Enquiry into the Nature of
...., Volume I.
12. Note in the 4th German edition. — The
latest English and American “trusts” are already striving to attain
this goal by attempting to unite at least all the large-scale concerns in one
branch of industry into one great joint-stock company with a practical
monopoly. F. E.
13. Note in the 3rd German edition. — In
Marx’s copy there is here the marginal note: “Here note for working
out later; if the extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and a
smaller capital in the same branch of business the profits are as the
magnitudes of the capitals advanced. If the quantitative extension induces
qualitative change, then the rate of profit on the larger capital rises
simultaneously.” F. E.
14. The census of England and Wales shows: all persons
employed in agriculture (landlords, farmers, gardeners, shepherds, &c.,
included): 1851, 2,011,447; 1861, 1,924,110. Fall, 87,337. Worsted manufacture:
1851, 102,714 persons; 1861, 79,242. Silk weaving: 1851, 111,940; 1861,
101,678. Calico-printing: 1851, 12,098; 1861, 12,556. A small rise that, in the
face of the enormous extension of this industry and implying a great fall
proportionally in the number of labourers employed. Hat-making: 1851, 15,957;
1861, 13,814. Straw-hat and bonnet-making: 1851, 20,393; 1861, 18,176. Malting:
1851, 10,566; 1861, 10,677. Chandlery, 1851, 4,949; 1861, 4,686. This fall is
due, besides other causes, to the increase in lighting by gas. Comb-making:
1851, 2,038; 1861, 1,478. Sawyers: 1851, 30,552; 1861, 31,647 — a
small rise in consequence of the increase of sawing-machines. Nail-making:
1851, 26,940; 1861, 26,130 — fall in consequence of the competition of
machinery. Tin and copper-mining: 1851, 31,360; 1861, 32,041. On the other
hand: Cotton-spinning and weaving: 1851, 371,777; 1861, 456,646. Coal-mining:
1851, 183,389, 1861, 246,613, “The increase of labourers is generally
greatest, since 1851, in such branches of industry in which machinery has not
up to the present been employed with success.” (Census of England and
Wales for 1861. Vol. III. London, 1863, p. 36.)
15. Added in the 4th German edition. —
The law of progressive diminution of the relative magnitude of variable capital
and its effect on the condition of the class of wage workers is conjectured
rather than understood by some of the prominent economists of the classical
school. The greatest service was rendered here by John Barton, although he,
like all the rest, lumps together constant and fixed capital, variable and
circulating capital. He says:
“The demand for labour
depends on the increase of circulating, and not of fixed capital. Were it true
that the proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at all
times, and in all circumstances, then, indeed, it follows that the number of
labourers employed is in proportion to the wealth of the state. But such a
proposition has not the semblance of probability. As arts are cultivated, and
civilisation is extended, fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to
circulating capital. The amount of fixed capital employed in the production of
a piece of British muslin is at least a hundred, probably a thousand times
greater than that employed in a similar piece of Indian muslin. And the
proportion of circulating capital is a hundred or thousand times less ... the
whole of the annual savings, added to the fixed capital, would have no effect
in increasing the demand for labour.” (John Barton, “Observations
on the Circumstances which Influence the Condition of the Labouring Classes of
Society.” London, 1817, pp. 16, 17.) “The same cause which may
increase the net revenue of the country may at the same time render the
population redundant, and deteriorate the condition of the labourer.”
(Ricardo, l. c., p. 469.) With increase of capital, “the demand [for
labour] will be in a diminishing ratio.” (Ibid., p. 480, Note.)
“The amount of capital devoted to the maintenance of labour may vary,
independently of any changes in the whole amount of capital.... Great
fluctuations in the amount of employment, and great suffering may become more
frequent as capital itself becomes more plentiful.” (Richard Jones,
“An Introductory Lecture on Pol. Econ.,” Lond. 1833, p. 13)
“Demand [for labour] will rise ... not in proportion to the accumulation
of the general capital. ... Every augmentation, therefore, in the national
stock destined for reproduction, comes, in the progress of society, to have
less and less influence upon the condition of the labourer.” (Ramsay, l.
c., pp. 90, 91.)
16. H. Merivale. “Lectures on Colonisation and
Colonies,” 1841, Vol. I , p. 146.
17. Malthus, “Principles of Political
Economy,” pp. 215, 319, 320. In this work, Malthus finally discovers,
with the help of Sismondi, the beautiful Trinity of capitalistic production:
over-production, over-population, over-consumption — three very delicate
monsters, indeed. Cf. F. Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der
Nationalökonomie,” l. c., p, 107, et seq.
18. Harriet Martineau, “A Manchester
Strike,” 1832, p. 101.
19. Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a
pamphlet of the operative cotton-spinners of Blackburn, fierce denunciations of
overwork, which, in consequence of the Factory Acts, of course only affected
adult male labourers. “The adult operatives at this mill have been asked
to work from 12 to 13 hours per day, while there are hundreds who are compelled
to be idle who would willingly work partial time, in order to maintain their
families and save their brethren from a premature grave through being
overworked.... We,” it goes on to say, “would ask if the practice
of working overtime by a number of hands, is likely to create a good feeling
between masters and servants. Those who are worked overtime feel the injustice
equally with those who are condemned to forced idleness. There is in the
district almost sufficient work to give to all partial employment if fairly
distributed. We are only asking what is right in requesting the masters
generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better state
of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands
overtime, while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon
charity.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., Oct. 31, 1863,” p. 8.)
The author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” grasps the effect
of a relative surplus population on the employed labourers with his usual
unerring bourgeois instinct. “Another cause of idleness in this kingdom
is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands .... Whenever from an
extraordinary demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel
their own consequence, and will make their masters feel it likewise — it
is amazing; but so depraved are the dispositions of these people, that in such
cases a set of workmen have combined to distress the employer by idling a whole
day together.” (“Essay, &c.,” pp. 27, 28.) The fellows in
fact were hankering after a rise in wages.
20. Economist, Jan. 21. 1860.
21. Whilst during the last six months of 1866, 80-90,000
working people in London were thrown out of work, the Factory Report for that
same half year says: “It does not appear absolutely true to say that
demand will always produce supply just at the moment when it is needed. It has
not done so with labour, for much machinery has been idle last year for want of
hands.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” p.
81.)
22. Opening address to the Sanitary Conference,
Birmingham, January 15th, 1875, by J. Chamberlain, Mayor of the town, now
(1883) President of the Board of Trade.
23. 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England
and Wales “contained 10,960,998 inhabitants, while the villages and
country parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851, 580 towns were distinguished,
and the population in them and in the surrounding country was nearly equal. But
while in the subsequent ten years the population in the villages and the
country increased half a million, the population in the 580 towns increased by
a million and a half (1,554,067). The increase of the population of the country
parishes is 6.5 per cent., and of the towns 17.3 per cent. The difference in
the rates of increase is due to the migration from country to town.
Three-fourths of the total increase of population has taken place in the
towns.” (“Census, &c.,” pp. 11 and 12.)
24. “Poverty seems favourable to
generation.” (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of
God, according to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani “Iddio af che gli
uomini che esercitano mestieri di prima utilità nascono abbondantemente.”
(Galiani, l. c., p. 78.) [God ordains that men who carry
on trades of primary utility are born in abundance] “Misery up to
the extreme point of famine and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to
increase population.” (S. Laing, “National Distress,” 1844,
p. 69.) After Laing has illustrated this by statistics, he continues: “If
the people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be
depopulated.”
25. “De jour en jour il devient donc plus clair
que les rapports de production dans lesquels se meut la bourgeoisie n’ont
pas un caractère un, un caractère simple, mais un caractère de duplicité; que
dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels se produit la richesse, la misère se
produit aussi; que dans les mêmes rapports dans lesquels il y a développement
des forces productives, il y a une force productive de répression; que ces
rapports ne produisent la richesse bourgeoise, c’est-à-dire la richesse
de la classe bourgeoise, qu’en anéantissant continuellement la richesse
des membres intégrants de cette classe et en produisant un prolétariat toujours
croissant.” [From day to day it thus becomes
clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a
simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations
in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the selfsame
relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is also a
force producing repression; that there relations produce bourgeois wealth,
i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class, only by continually annihilating the
wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an evergrowing
proletariat] (Karl Marx: “Misère de la Philosophie,” p.
116.)
26. G. Ortes: “Delia Economia Nazionale libri sei,
1777,” in Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xxi, pp. 6, 9, 22, 25, etc. Ortes
says, l. c., p. 32: “In luoco di progettar sistemi inutili per la
felicità de’popoli, mi limiterò a investigare la regione della loro
infelicità.” [Instead of projecting useless systems
for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating
the reasons for their unhappiness]
27. “A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a
Well-wisher of Mankind. (The Rev. J. Townsend) 1786,” republished Lond.
1817, pp. 15, 39, 41. This “delicate” parson, from whose work just
quoted, as well as from his “Journey through Spain,” Malthus often
copies whole pages, himself borrowed the greater part of his doctrine from Sir
James Steuart, whom he however alters in the borrowing. E.g., when
Steuart says: “Here, in slavery, was a forcible method of making mankind
diligent,” [for the non-workers] ... “Men were then forced to
work” [i.e.,to work gratis for others], “because they were
slaves of others; men are now forced to work” [i.e., to work
gratis for non-workers] “because they are the slaves of their
necessities,” he does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of
benefices, that the wage labourer must always go fasting. He wishes, on the
contrary, to increase their wants and to make the increasing number of their
wants a stimulus to their labour for the “more delicate.”
28. Storch, l. c., t. iii, p. 223.
29. Sismondi, l. c., pp. 79, 80, 85.
30. Destutt de Tracy, l. c., p. 231: “Les nations
pauvres, c’est là où le peuple est à son aise; et les nations riches,
c’est là où il est ordinairement pauvre.” [The poor nations are those where the people are comfortably
off; and the rich nations, those where the people are generally poor]
31. “Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H. M.
Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1866. p. 38.
32. lbidem.
33. These figures are sufficient for comparison, but,
taken absolutely, are false, since, perhaps, £100,000,000 of income are
annually not declared. The complaints of the Inland Revenue Commissioners of
systematic fraud, especially on the part of the commercial and industrial
classes, are repeated in each of their reports. So e.g., “A
Joint-stock company returns £6,000 as assessable profits, the surveyor raises
the amount to £88,000, and upon that sum duty is ultimately paid. Another
company which returns £190,000 is finally compelled to admit that the true
return should be £250,000.” (Ibid., p, 42.)
34. “Census, &c.,” l. c., p. 29. John
Bright’s assertion that 150 landlords own half of England, and 12 half
the Scotch soil, has never been refuted.
35. “Fourth Report, &c., of Inland
Revenue.” Lond., 1860, p. 17.
36. These are the net incomes after certain legally
authorised abatements.
37. At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese
market is again overstocked by the consignments of the British cotton
manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent. took place amongst
the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of a similar operation, there
was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston. [Added in the 4th German
edition. — That was the prelude to the crisis which broke out immediately
afterwards. — F. E.]
38. “Census, &C.,” l. c., P. 11.
39. Gladstone in the House of Commons, Feb. 13th, 1843.
Times, Feb. 14th, 1843 — “It is one of the most melancholy
features in the social state of this country that we see, beyond the
possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the
consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and
distress; there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the
upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their
means of enjoyment.” (Hansard, 13th Feb.)
40. Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 16th, 1863.
Morning Star, April 17th.
41. See the official accounts in the Blue book:
“Miscellaneous Statistics of the United Kingdom,” Part vi., London,
1866, pp. 260-273, passim. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums,
&c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending dowries
for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of the means of
subsistence is never forgotten there.
42. Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864.
— “The Hansard version runs: ‘Again, and yet more at large
— what is human life, but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for
existence.’ The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone’s
Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the
following quotation from Boileau:
“Voilà l’homme en
effet. Il va du blanc au noir,
Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.
Importun à tout autre, à soi-même incommode,
Il change à tout moment d’esprit comme de mode.”
[Such is the man: he goes from black to white. / He
condemns in the morning what he felt in the evening. / A nuisance to everyone
else, and an inconvenience to himself, / he changes his way of thinking as
easily as he changes his way of dressing]
(“The Theory of Exchanges, &c.,” London, 1864, p. 135.)
43. H. Fawcett, l. c., pp. 67-82. As to the increasing
dependence of labourers on the retail shopkeepers, this is the consequence of
the frequent oscillations and interruptions of their employment.
44. Wales here is always included in England.
45. A peculiar light is thrown on the advance made since
the time of Adam Smith, by the fact that by him the word
“workhouse” is still occasionally used as synonymous with
“manufactory”; e.g., the opening of his chapter on the
division of labour; “those employed in every different branch of the work
can often be collected into the same workhouse.”
46. “Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864,” p.
13.
47. l. c., p. 17.
48. l. c., p. 13.
49. l. c., Appendix, p. 232.
50. l. c., pp. 232, 233.
51. l. c., pp. 14, 15.
52. “In no particular have the rights of
persons been so avowedly and shamefully sacrificed to the rights of
property as in regard to the lodging of the labouring class. Every
large town may be looked upon as a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where
thousands pass yearly through the fire as offerings to the moloch of
avarice,” S. Laing, l. c., p. 150.
53. “Public Health, Eighth Report. 1866.” p.
14, note.
54. l. c., p. 89. With reference to the children in
these colonies, Dr. Hunter says: “People are not now alive to tell us how
children were brought up before this age of dense agglomerations of poor began,
and he would be a rash prophet who should tell us what future behaviour is to
be expected from the present growth of children, who, under circumstances
probably never before paralleled in this country, are now completing their
education for future practice, as ’dangerous classes’ by sitting up
half the night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and
quarrelsome.” (l. c., p. 56.)
55. l. c., p. 62.
56. “Report of the Officer of Health of St.
Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865.”
57. “Public Health, Eighth Report, 1866,” p. 91.
58. l. c., p. 88.
59. l. c., p. 88.
60. l. c., p. 89.
61. l. c., p. 55 and 56.
62. l. c., p. 149.
63. l. c., p. 50.
64.
COLLECTING AGENTS LIST
(BRADFORD).
Houses
Vulcan Street, No. 122
1 room
16 persons
Lumiev Street, No. 13
1 room
11 persons
Bower Street, No. 41
1 room
11 persons
Portland Street. No. 112
1 room
10 persons
Hardy Street, No. 17
1 room
10 persons
North Street, No. 18
1 room
16 persons
North Street, No. 17
1 room
13 persons
Wymer Street, No. 19
1 room
8 adults
Jowett Street, No. 56
1 room
12 persons
George Street, No. 150
1 room
3 families
Rifle Court Marygate, No. 11
1 room
11 persons
Marshall Street, No. 28
1 room
10 persons
Marshall Street, No. 49
1 room
3 families
George Street, No. 128
1 room
18 persons
George Street, No. 130
1 room
16 persons
Edward Street, No. 4
1 room
17 persons
George Street, No. 49
1 room
2 families
York Street, No. 34
1 room
2 families
Salt Pie Street (bottom)
2 room
26 persons
Cellars
Regent Square
1 cellar
8 persons
Acre Street
1 cellar
7 persons
33 Roberts Court
1 cellar
7 persons
Back Pratt Street used as a brazier’s shop
1 cellar
7 persons
27 Ebenezer Street
1 cellar
6 persons
l. c.,
p. 111.
(no male above 18).
65. l. c., p. 114.
66. l. c., p. 50.
67. “Public Health. Seventh Report. 1865,”
p. 18.
68. l. c., p. 165.
69. l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving Officer of
the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registar-General as follows:
— “At Doveholes, a number of small excavations have been made into
a large hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of lime-kilns), and which are used as
dwellings, and occupied by labourers and others employed in the construction of
a railway now in course of construction through that neighbourhood. The
excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies about them, and
not the slightest means of ventilation except up a hole pulled through the top,
and used for a chimney. In consequence of this defect, small-pox has been
raging for some time, and some deaths [amongst the troglodytes] have been
caused by it.” (l. c., note 2.)
70. The details given at the end of Part IV. refer
especially to the labourers in coal mines. On the still worse condition in
metal mines, see the very conscientious Report of the Royal Commission of
1864.
71. l. c., pp. 180, 182.
72. l. c., pp. 515, 517.
73. l. c., p. 16.
74. “Wholesale starvation of the London Poor....
Within the last few days the walls of London have been placarded with large
posters, bearing the following remarkable announcement: — ‘Fat
oxen! Starving men! The fat oxen from their palace of glass have gone to feed
the rich in their luxurious abode, while the starving men are left to rot and
die in their wretched dens.’ The placards bearing these ominous words are
put up at certain intervals. No sooner has one set been defaced or covered
over, than a fresh set is placarded in the former, or some equally public
place.... This ... reminds one of the secret revolutionary associations which
prepared the French people for the events of 1789.... At this moment, while
English workmen with their wives and children are dying of cold and hunger,
there are millions of English gold — the produce of English labour
— being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign
enterprises.” —Reynolds’ Newspaper, January 20th,
1867.
75. James E. Thorold Rogers. (Prof. of Polit. Econ. in
the University of Oxford.) “A History of Agriculture and Prices in
England.” Oxford, 1866, v. 1, p. 690. This work, the fruit of patient and
diligent labour, contains in the two volumes that have so far appeared, only
the period from 1259 to 1400. The second volume contains simply statistics. It
is the first authentic “History of Prices” of the time that we
possess.
76. “Reasons for the Late Increase of the
Poor-Rates: or a comparative view of the prices of labour and
provisions.” Lond., 1777, pp. 5, 11.
77. Dr. Richard Price: “Observations on
Reversionary Payments,” 6th Ed. By W. Morgan, Lond., 1803, v. II., pp.
158, 159. Price remarks on p. 159: “The nominal price of day-labour is at
present no more than about four times, or, at most, five times higher than it
was in the year 1514. But the price of corn is seven times, and of flesh-meat
and raiment about fifteen times higher. So far, therefore, has the price of
labour been even from advancing in proportion to the increase in the expenses
of living, that it does not appear that it bears now half the proportion to
those expenses that it did bear.”
78. Barton, l. c., p. 26. For the end of the 18th
century cf. Eden, l. c.
79. Parry, l. c., p. 86.
80. id., p. 213.
81. S. Laing, l. c., p. 62.
82. “England and America.” Lond., 1833, Vol.
1, p. 47.
83. The landed aristocracy advanced themselves to this
end, of course per Parliament, funds from the State Treasury, at a very low
rate of interest, which the farmers have to make good at a much higher rate.
84. London Economist, May 29th, 1845, p.
290.
85. The decrease of the middle-class farmers can be seen
especially in the census category: “Farmer’s son, grandson,
brother, nephew, daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece"; in a word, the
members of his own family, employed by the farmer. This category numbered, in
1851, 216,851 persons; in 1861, only 176,151. From 1851 to 1871, the farms
under 20 acres fell by more than 900 in number; those between 50 and 75 acres
fell from 8,253 to 6,370; the same thing occurred with all other farms under
100 acres. On the other hand, during the same twenty years, the number of large
farms increased; those of 300-500 acres rose from 7,771 to 8,410, those of more
than 500 acres from 2,755 to 3,914, those of more than 1,000 acres from 492 to
582.
86. The number of shepherds increased from 12,517 to
25,559.
87. Census, l. c., p. 36.
88. Rogers, l. c., p. 693, p. 10. Mr. Rogers belongs to
the Liberal School, is a personal friend of Cobden and Bright, and therefore no
laudator temporis acti.
89. “Public Health. Seventh Report,” 1865,
p. 242. It is therefore nothing unusual either for the landlord to raise a
labourer’s rent as soon as he hears that he is earning a little more, or
for the farmer to lower the wage of the labourer, “because his wife has
found a trade,” l. c.
90. l. c., p. 135.
91. l. c., p. 134.
92. “Report of the Commissioners ... relating to
Transportation and Penal Servitude,” Lond., 1863, pp. 42, 50.
93. l. c., p. 77. “Memorandum by the Lord Chief
Justice.”
94. l. c., Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence.
95. l. c., Vol. 1. Appendix, p. 280.
96. l. c., pp. 274, 275.
97. “Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864, pp.
238, 249, 261, 262.
98. l. c., p. 262.
99. l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural labourer
receives only 1/4 as much milk, and 1/2 as much bread as the Irish. Arthur Young
in his “Tour in Ireland,” at the beginning of this century, already
noticed the better nourishment of the latter. The reason is simply this, that
the poor Irish farmer is incomparably more humane than the rich English. As
regards Wales, that which is said in the text holds only for the southwest. All
the doctors there agree that the increase of the death-rate through
tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of
the physical condition of the population, and all ascribe this deterioration to
poverty. “His (the farm labourer’s) keep is reckoned at about five
pence a day, but in many districts it was said to be of much less cost to the
farmer” [himself very poor].... “A morsel of the salt meat or
bacon, ... salted and dried to the texture of mahogany, and hardly worth the
difficult process of assimilation ... is used to flavour a large quantity of
broth or gruel, of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the
labourer’s dinner.” The advance of industry resulted for him, in
this harsh and damp climate, in “the abandonment of the solid homespun
clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods,” and of
stronger drinks for so-called tea. “The agriculturist, after several
hours’ exposure to wind and rain, pins his cottage to sit by a fire of
peat or of balls of clay and small coal kneaded together, from which volumes of
carbonic and sulphurous acids are poured forth. His walls are of mud and
stones, his floor the bare earth which was there before the hut was built, his
roof a mass of loose and sodden thatch. Every crevice is topped to maintain
warmth, and in an atmosphere of diabolic odour, with a mud floor, with his only
clothes drying on his back, he often sups and sleeps with his wife and
children. Obstetricians who have passed parts of the night in such cabins have
described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of the floor, and they
were forced (easy task) to drill a hole through the wall to effect a little
private respiration. It was attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of
life, that to these insanitary influences, and many more, the underfed peasant
was nightly exposed, and of the result, a debilitated and scrofulous people,
there was no want of evidence.... The statements of the relieving officers of
Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire show in a striking way the same state of
things. There is besides “a plague more horrible still, the great number
of idiots.” Now a word on the climatic conditions. “A strong
south-west wind blows over the whole country for 8 or 9 months in the year,
bringing with it torrents of rain, which discharge principally upon the western
slopes of the hills. Trees are rare, except in sheltered places, and where not
protected, are blown out of all shape. The cottages generally crouch under some
bank, or often in a ravine or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and
native cattle can live on the pastures.... The young people migrate to the
eastern mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth. Carmarthenshire is the
breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital. The population can
therefore barely maintain its numbers.” Thus in Cardiganshire:
1851
1861
Males
45,155
44,446
Females
52,459
52,955
97,614
97,401
Dr. Hunter’s Report in “Public Health,
Seventh Report. 1865,” pp. 498-502, passim.
100. In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It
will soon be learnt from experience that tinkering of this sort is of no
use.
101. In order to understand that which follows, we must
remember that “Close Villages” are those whose owners are one or
two large landlords. “Open villages,” those whose soil belongs to
many smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators can build
cottages and lodging-houses.
102. A show-village of this kind looks very nice, but
is as unreal as the villages that Catherine II. saw on her journey to the
Crimea. In recent times the shepherd also has often been banished from these
show-villages; e.g., near Market Harboro is sheep-farm of about 500
acres, which only employs the labour of one man. To reduce the long trudges
over these wide plains, the beautiful pastures of Leicester and Northampton,
the shepherd used to get a cottage on the farm. Now they give him a thirteenth
shilling a week for lodging, that he must find far away in an open village.
103. “The labourers’ houses (in the open
villages, which, of course, are always overcrowded) are usually in rows, built
with their backs against the extreme edge of the plot of land which the builder
could call his, and on this account are not allowed light and air, except from
the front.” (Dr. Hunter’s Report, l. c., p. 135.) Very often the
beerseller or grocer of the village is at the same time the letter of its
houses. In this case the agricultural labourer finds in him a second master,
besides the farmer. He must be his customer as well as his tenant. “The
hind with his 10s. a week, minus a rent of £4 a year ... is obliged to buy at
the seller’s own terms, his modicum of tea, sugar, flour, soap, candles,
and beer.” (l. c., p. 132.) These open villages form, in fact, the
“penal settlements” of the English agricultural proletariat. Many
of the cottages are simply lodging-houses, through which all the rabble of the
neighbourhood passes. The country labourer and his family who had often, in a
way truly wonderful, preserved, under the foulest conditions, a thoroughness
and purity of character, go, in these, utterly to the devil. It is, of course,
the fashion amongst the aristocratic shylocks to shrug their shoulders
pharisaically at the building speculators, the small landlords, and the open
villages. They know well enough that their “close villages” and
“show-villages” are the birth-places of the open villages, and
could not exist without them. “The labourers ... were it not for the
small owners, would, for by far the most part, have to sleep under the trees of
the farms on which they work.” (l. c., p. 135.) The system of
“open” and “closed” villages obtains in all the Midland
counties and throughout the East of England.
104. “The employer ... is ... directly or
indirectly securing to himself the profit on a man employed at 10s. a week, and
receiving from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent for houses not worth £20 in
a really free market, but maintained at their artificial value by the power of
the owner to say ‘Use my house, or go seek a hiring elsewhere without a
character from me....’ Does a man wish to better himself, to go as a
plate-layer on the railway, or to begin quarry-work, the same power is ready
with ‘Work for me at this low rate of wages or begone at a week’s
notice; take your pig with you, and get what you can for the potatoes growing
in your garden.’ Should his interest appear to be better served by it, an
enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases by the owner
(i.e., the farmer) as the penalty for leaving his service.” (Dr.
Hunter, l. c., p. 132.)
105. “New married couples are no edifying study
for grown-up brothers and sisters: and though instances must not be recorded,
sufficient data are remembered to warrant the remark, that great depression and
sometimes death are the lot of the female participator in the offence of
incest.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 137.) A member of the rural police who
had for many years been a detective in the worst quarters of London, says of
the girls of his village: “their boldness and shamelessness I never saw
equalled during some years of police life and detective duty in the worst parts
of London .... They live like pigs, great boys and girls, mothers and fathers,
all sleeping in one room, in many instances.” (“Child. Empl. Com.
Sixth Report, 1867,” p. 77 sq. 155.)
106. “Public Health. Seventh Report, 1865,”
pp. 9, 14 passim.
107. “The heaven-born employment of the hind
gives dignity even to his position. He is not a slave, but a soldier of peace,
and deserves his place in married men’s quarters to be provided by the
landlord, who has claimed a power of enforced labour similar to that the
country demands of the soldier. He no more receives market-price for his work
than does the soldier. Like the soldier he is caught young, ignorant, knowing
only his own trade, and his own locality. Early marriage and the operation of
the various laws of settlement affect the one as enlistment and the Mutiny Act
affect the other.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.) Sometimes an
exceptionally soft-hearted landlord relents as the solitude he has created.
“It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one’s country,”
said Lord Leicester, when complimented on the completion of Hookham. “I
look around and not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of Giant
Castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.”
108. A similar movement is seen during the last ten
years in France; in proportion as capitalist production there takes possession
of agriculture, it drives the “surplus” agricultural population
into the towns. Here also we find deterioration in the housing and other
conditions at the source of the surplus population. On the special
“prolétariat foncier,” to which this system of parcelling out the
land has given rise, see, among others, the work of Colins, already quoted, and
Karl Marx “Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.” 2nd
edition. Hamburg, 1869, pp. 56, &c. In 1846, the town population in France
was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58; in 1861, the town by
28.86, the agricultural by 71.14 per cent. During the last 5 years, the
diminution of the agricultural percentage of the population has been yet more
marked. As early as 1846, Pierre Dupont in his “Ouvriers” sang:
Mal vêtus, logés dans des
trous,
Sous les combles, dans les décombres,
Nous vivons avec les hiboux
Et les larrons, amis des ombres.
[Badly clothed, living in holes, under the eaves, in the
ruins, with the owls and the thieves, companions of the shadows]
109. “Sixth and last Report of the
Children’s Employment Commission,” published at the end of March,
1867. It deals solely with the agricultural gang-system.
110. “Child. Emp. Comm., VI. Report." Evidence
173, p. 37.
111. Some gang-masters, however, have worked themselves
up to the position of farmers of 500 acres, or proprietors of whole rows of
houses.
112. “Half the girls of Ludford have been ruined
by going out” (in gangs). l. c., p. 6, § 32.
113. “They (gangs) have greatly increased of late
years. In some places they are said to have been introduced at comparatively
late dates; in others where gangs ... have been known for many years ... more
and younger children are employed in them.” (l. c., p. 79, § 174).
114. “Small farmers never employ gangs.”
“It is not on poor land, but on land which affords rent of from 40 to 50
shillings, that women and children are employed in the greatest numbers.”
(l. c., pp. 17, 14.)
115. To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent
was so grateful that he indignantly declared to the Commission of Inquiry that
the whole hubbub was only due to the name of the system. If instead of
“gang” it were called “the Agricultural Juvenile Industrial
Self-supporting Association,” everything would be all right.
116. “Gang work is cheaper than other work; that
is why they are employed,” says a former gang-master (l. c., p. 17, § 14
)."The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and decidedly the
worst for the children,” says a farmer (l. c., p. 16, § 3.)
117. “Undoubtedly much of the work now done by
children in gangs used to be done by men and women. More men are out of work
now where children and women are employed than formerly.” (l. c., p. 43,
n. 202.) On the other hand, “the labour question in some agricultural
districts, particularly the arable, is becoming so serious in consequence of
emigration, and the facility afforded by railways for getting to large towns
that I (the “I” is the steward of a great lord) think the services
of children are most indispensable,” (l. c., p. 80, n. 180.) For the
“labour question” in English agricultural districts, differently
from the rest of the civilised world, means the landlords’ and
farmers’ question, viz., how is it possible, despite an always
increasing exodus of the agricultural folk, to keep up a sufficient relative
surplus population in the country, and by means of it keep the wages of the
agricultural labourer at a minimum?
118. The “Public Health Report,” where in
dealing with the subject of children’s mortality, the gang-system is
treated in passing, remains unknown to the press, and, therefore, to the
English public. On the other hand, the last report of the “Child. Empl.
Comm.” afforded the press sensational copy always welcome. Whilst the
Liberal press asked how the fine gentlemen and ladies, and the well-paid clergy
of the State Church, with whom Lincolnshire swarms, could allow such a system
to arise on their estates, under their very eyes, they who send out expressly
missions to the Antipodes, “for the improvement of the morals of South
Sea Islanders” — the more refined press confined itself to
reflections on the coarse degradation of the agricultural population who are
capable of selling their children into such slavery! Under the accursed
conditions to which these “delicate” people condemn the
agricultural labourer, it would not be surprising if he ate his own children.
What is really wonderful is the healthy integrity of character, he has, in
great part, retained. The official reports prove that the parents, even in the
gang districts, loathe the gang-system. “There is much in the evidence
that shows that the parents of the children would, in many instances, be glad
to be aided by the requirements of a legal obligation, to resist the pressure
and the temptations to which they are often subject. They are liable to be
urged, at times by the parish officers, at times by employers, under threats of
being themselves discharged, to be taken to work at an age when ... school
attendance ... would be manifestly to their greater advantage.... All that time
and strength wasted; all the suffering from extra and unprofitable fatigue
produced to the labourer and to his children; every instance in which the
parent may have traced the moral ruin of his child to the undermining of
delicacy by the over-crowding of cottages, or to the contaminating influences
of the public gang, must have been so many incentives to feelings in the minds
of the labouring poor which can be well understood, and which it would be
needless to particularise. They must be conscious that much bodily and mental
pain has thus been inflicted upon them from causes for which they were in no
way answerable; to which, had it been in their power, they would have in no way
consented; and against which they were powerless to struggle.” (l. c., p.
xx., § 82, and xxiii., n. 96.)
119. Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867 persons;
1811, 6,084,996; 1821, 6,869,544; 1831, 7,828,347; 1841, 8,222,664.
120. The result would be found yet more unfavourable if
we went further back. Thus: Sheep in 1865, 3,688,742, but in 1856, 3,694,294.
Pigs in 1865, 1,299,893, but in 1858, 1,409,883.
121. The data of the text are put together from the
materials of the “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland, General Abstracts,
Dublin,” for the years 1860, et seq., and “Agricultural
Statistics, Ireland. Tables showing the estimated average produce, &c.,
Dublin, 1866.” These statistics are official, and laid before Parliament
annually.
Note to 2nd edition. The official statistics
for the year 1872 show, as compared with 1871, a decrease in area under
cultivation of 134,915 acres. An increase occurred in the cultivation of green
crops, turnips, mangold-wurzel, and the like; a decrease in the area under
cultivation for wheat of 16,000 acres; oats, 14,000; barley and rye, 4,000;
potatoes, 66,632; flax, 34,667; grass, clover, vetches, rape-seed, 30,000. The
soil under cultivation for wheat shows for the last 5 years the following
stages of decrease: — 1868, 285,000 acres; 1869, 280,000; 1870, 259,000;
1871, 244,000; 1872, 228,000. For 1872 we find, in round numbers, an increase
of 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep, and a decrease of 236,000
pigs.
122. The total yearly income under Schedule D. is
different in this table from that which appears in the preceding ones, because
of certain deductions allowed by law.
123. If the product also diminishes relatively per
acre, it must not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has
indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without as much as allowing its
cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the soil that had been
exhausted.
124. As Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the
“principle of population,” Th. Sadler, before the publication of
his work on population, issued his famous book, “Ireland, its Evils and
their Remedies.” 2nd edition, London, 1829. Here, by comparison of the
statistics of the individual provinces, and of the individual counties in each
province, he proves that the misery there is not, as Malthus would have it, in
proportion to the number of the population, but in inverse ratio to this.
125. Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of
emigrants amounted to 2,325,922.
126. According to a table in Murphy’s
“Ireland Industrial, Political and Social,” 1870, 94.6 per cent. of
the holdings do not reach 100 acres, 5.4 exceed 100 acres.
127. “Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors on the
Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin,” 1870. See also
“Agricultural labourers (Ireland). Return, etc.” 8 March, 1861,
London, 1862.
128. l. c., pp. 29, 1.
129. l. c., p. 12.
130. l. c., p. 12.
131. l. c., p. 25.
132. l. c., p. 27.
133. l. c., p. 25.
134. l. c., p. 1.
135. l. c., pp. 31, 32.
136. l. c., p. 25.
137. l. c., p. 30.
138. l. c., pp. 21, 13.
139. “Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct.,
1866,” p. 96.
140. The total area includes also peat, bogs, and waste
land.
141. How the famine and its consequences have been
deliberately made the most of, both by the individual landlords and by the
English legislature, to forcibly carry out the agricultural revolution and to
thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion satisfactory to the
landlords, I shall show more fully in Vol. III. of this work, in the section on
landed property. There also I return to the condition of the small farmers and
the agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau W. Senior
says, with other things, in his posthumous work, “Journals, Conversations
and Essays relating to Ireland.” 2 vols. London, 1868; Vol. II., p. 282.
“Well,” said Dr. G., “we have got our Poor Law and it is a
great instrument for giving the victory to the landlords. Another, and a still
more powerful instrument is emigration.... No friend to Ireland can wish the
war to be prolonged [between the landlords and the small Celtic farmers]
— still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants. The
sooner it is over — the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with
the comparatively thin population which a grazing country requires, the better
for all classes.” The English Corn Laws of 1815 secured Ireland the
monopoly of the free importation of corn into Great Britain. They favoured
artificially, therefore, the cultivation of corn. With the abolition of the
Corn Laws in 1846, this monopoly was suddenly removed. Apart from all other
circumstances, this event alone was sufficient to give a great impulse to the
turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the concentration of farms, and to
the eviction of small cultivators. After the fruitfulness of the Irish soil had
been praised from 1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself
destined for the cultivation of wheat, English agronomists, economists,
politicians, discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to produce
forage. M. Léonce de Lavergne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of
the Channel. It takes a “serious” man, à la Lavergne, to be caught
by such childishness.
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Next: Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of
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Capital Volume One- Index