The worst situation is that of those workers who have to compete against a machine that is making its way.  The price of the goods which they produce adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine, and as the latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the lowest wages.  The same thing happens to every operative employed upon an old machine in competition with later improvements.  And who else is there to bear the hardship?  The manufacturer will not throw out his old apparatus, nor will he sustain the loss upon it; out of the dead mechanism he can make nothing, so he fastens upon the living worker, the universal scapegoat of society.  Of all the workers in competition with machinery, the most ill-used are the hand-loom cotton weavers.  They receive the most trifling wages, and, with full work, are not in a position to earn more than ten shillings a week.  One class of woven goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and hand-weaving is the last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in other branches, so that the trade is always overcrowded.  Hence it comes that, in average seasons, the hand-weaver counts himself fortunate if he can earn six or seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his loom fourteen to eighteen hours a day.  Most woven goods require moreover a damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in part, for this reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them from paying for better dwellings, the workrooms of these weavers are usually without wooden or paved floors.  I have been in many dwellings of such weavers, in remote, vile courts and alleys, usually in cellars.  Often half-a-dozen of these hand-loom weavers, several of them married, live together in a cottage with one or two workrooms, and one large sleeping-room.  Their food consists almost exclusively of potatoes, with perhaps oatmeal porridge, rarely milk, and scarcely ever meat.  Great numbers of them are Irish or of Irish descent.  And these poor hand-loom weavers, first to suffer from every crisis, and last to be relieved from it, must serve the bourgeoisie as a handle in meeting attacks upon the factory system.  “See,” cries the bourgeois, triumphantly, “see how these poor creatures must famish, while the mill operatives are thriving, and then judge the factory {140} system!” As though it were not precisely the factory system and the machinery belonging to it which had so shamefully crushed the hand-loom weavers, and as though the bourgeoisie did not know this quite as well as ourselves!  But the bourgeoisie has interests at stake, and so a falsehood or two and a bit of hypocrisy won’t matter much.