Here are six such cases in four months, all of which have their sole origin in the embitterment of the working-men against the employers.  What sort of a social state it must be in which such things are possible I need hardly say.  These facts are proof enough that in England, even in good business years, such as 1843, the social war is avowed and openly carried on, and still the English bourgeoisie does not stop to reflect!  But the case which speaks most loudly is that of the Glasgow Thugs, {221a} which came up before the Assizes from the 3rd to the 11th of January, 1838.  It appears from the proceedings that the Cotton-Spinners’ Union, which existed here from the year 1816, possessed rare organisation and power.  The members were bound by an oath to adhere to the decision of the majority, and had during every turnout a secret committee which was unknown to the mass of the members, and controlled the funds of the Union absolutely.  This committee fixed a price upon the heads of knobsticks and obnoxious manufacturers and upon incendiarisms in mills.  A mill was thus set on fire in which female knobsticks were employed in spinning in the place of men; a Mrs. M’Pherson, mother of one of these girls, was murdered, and both murderers sent to America at the expense of the association.  As early as 1820, a knobstick named M’Quarry was shot at and wounded, for which deed the doer received twenty pounds from the Union, but was discovered and transported for life.  Finally, in 1837, in May, disturbances occurred in consequence of a turnout in the Oatbank and Mile End factories, in which perhaps a dozen knobsticks were maltreated.  In July, of the same year, the disturbances still continued, and a certain Smith, a knobstick, was so maltreated that he died.  The committee was now arrested, an investigation begun, and the leading members found guilty of participation in conspiracies, maltreatment of knobsticks, and incendiarism in the mill of James and Francis Wood, and they were transported for seven years.  What do our good Germans say to this story? {221b}

The property-holding class, and especially the manufacturing portion of it which comes into direct contact with the working-men, declaims with the greatest violence against these Unions, and is constantly trying to prove their uselessness to the working-men upon grounds which are economically perfectly correct, but for that very reason partially mistaken, and for the working-man’s understanding totally without effect.  The very zeal of the bourgeoisie shows that it is not disinterested in the matter; and apart from the indirect loss involved in a turnout, the state of the case is such that whatever goes into the pockets of the manufacturers comes of necessity out of those of the worker.  So that even if the working-men did not know that the Unions hold the emulation of their masters in the reduction of wages, at least in a measure, in check, they would still stand by the Unions, simply to the injury of