which threw a bright light upon them, so that every
ball of their enemies struck home, while every one
of their own shots missed its mark. Nevertheless,
the firing lasted half-an-hour, until the ammunition
was exhausted, and the object of the visit—the
demolition of all the destructible objects in the
yard—was attained. Then the military
approached, and the brickmakers withdrew to Eccles,
three miles from Manchester. A short time before
reaching Eccles they held roll-call, and each man
was called according to his number in the section when
they separated, only to fall the more certainly into
the hands of the police, who were approaching from
all sides. The number of the wounded must have
been very considerable, but those only could be counted
who were arrested. One of these had received
three bullets (in the thigh, the calf, and the shoulder),
and had travelled in spite of them more than four
miles on foot. These people have proved that
they, too, possess revolutionary courage, and do not
shun a rain of bullets. And when an unarmed
multitude, without a precise aim common to them all,
are held in check in a shut-off market-place, whose
outlets are guarded by a couple of policemen and dragoons,
as happened in 1842, this by no means proves a want
of courage. On the contrary, the multitude would
have stirred quite as little if the servants of public
(
i.e., of the bourgeois) order had not been
present. Where the working-people have a specific
end in view, they show courage enough; as, for instance,
in the attack upon Birley’s mill, which had
later to be protected by artillery.
In this connection, a word or two as to the respect
for the law in England. True, the law is sacred
to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition, enacted
with his consent, and for his benefit and protection.
He knows that, even if an individual law should injure
him, the whole fabric protects his interests; and
more than all, the sanctity of the law, the sacredness
of order as established by the active will of one
part of society, and the passive acceptance of the
other, is the strongest support of his social position.
Because the English bourgeois finds himself reproduced
in his law, as he does in his God, the policeman’s
truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club,
has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But
for the working-man quite otherwise! The working-man
knows too well, has learned from too oft-repeated
experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois
has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled
to do so, he never appeals to the law. It is
ridiculous to assert that the English working-man
fears the police, when every week in Manchester policemen
are beaten, and last year an attempt was made to storm
a station-house secured by iron doors and shutters.
The power of the police in the turnout of 1842 lay,
as I have already said, in the want of a clearly defined
object on the part of the working-men themselves.