productivity of English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence.  And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery, and Birmingham hardware.  How will it be when Continental, and especially American, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities—­when the predominating share, still held by British manufacturers, will become reduced from year to year?  Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea.

“I am not the first to point this out.  Already, in 1883, at the Southport meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President of the Economic section, stated plainly that ’the days of great trade profits in England were over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of industrial labour. The country might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state.’

“But what is to be the consequence?  Capitalist production cannot stop.  It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die.  Even now, the mere reduction of England’s lion’s share in the supply of the world’s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workpeople there.  What will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop?

“Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for capitalistic production.  Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion, and this constant expansion now becomes impossible.  It ends in a deadlock.  Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the question:  either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist production must.  Which is it to be?

“And the working-class?  If even under the unparalleled commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1866, they have had to undergo such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged, ‘protected’ minority was permanently benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its intensified condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of English trade?

“The truth is this:  during the period of England’s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly.  These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then.  And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England.  With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will lose that privileged