proclaimed a falsehood in every meeting of working-men in the factory districts.  And even if it were true that the relative wage, the price of piece-work only, has fallen, while the absolute wage, the sum to be earned in the week, remained unchanged, what would follow?  That the operatives have had quietly to look on while the manufacturers filled their purses from every improvement without giving the hands the smallest share in the gain.  The bourgeois forgets, in fighting the working-man, the most ordinary principles of his own Political Economy.  He who at other times swears by Malthus, cries out in his anxiety before the workers:  “Where could the millions by which the population of England has increased find work, without the improvements in machinery?” {138} As though the bourgeois did not know well enough that without machinery and the expansion of industry which it produced, these “millions” would never have been brought into the world and grown up!  The service which machinery has rendered the workers is simply this:  that it has brought home to their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which machinery shall no longer work against but for them.  Let the wise bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how many will answer:  “Mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery.”  The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive.  Every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a “surplus population,” to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative.  And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it!  To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralisation.  And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both.  The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of despair.