are phlegmatic dawdlers,—­America has in less than ten years created a manufacture which already competes with England in the coarser cotton goods, has excluded the English from the markets of North and South America, and holds its own in China, side by side with England.  If any country is adapted to holding a monopoly of manufacture, it is America.  Should English manufacture be thus vanquished—­and in the course of the next twenty years, if the present conditions remain unchanged, this is inevitable—­the majority of the proletariat must become forever superfluous, and has no other choice than to starve or to rebel.  Does the English bourgeoisie reflect upon this contingency?  On the contrary; its favourite economist, M’Culloch, teaches from his student’s desk, that a country so young as America, which is not even properly populated, cannot carry on manufacture successfully or dream of competing with an old manufacturing country like England.  It were madness in the Americans to make the attempt, for they could only lose by it; better far for them to stick to their agriculture, and when they have brought their whole territory under the plough, a time may perhaps come for carrying on manufacture with a profit.  So says the wise economist, and the whole bourgeoisie worships him, while the Americans take possession of one market after another, while a daring American speculator recently even sent a shipment of American cotton goods to England, where they were sold for re-exportation!

But assuming that England retained the monopoly of manufactures, that its factories perpetually multiply, what must be the result?  The commercial crises would continue, and grow more violent, more terrible, with the extension of industry and the multiplication of the proletariat.  The proletariat would increase in geometrical proportion, in consequence of the progressive ruin of the lower middle-class and the giant strides with which capital is concentrating itself in the hands of the few; and the proletariat would soon embrace the whole nation, with the exception of a few millionaires.  But in this development there comes a stage at which the proletariat perceives how easily the existing power may be overthrown, and then follows a revolution.

Neither of these supposed conditions may, however, be expected to arise.  The commercial crises, the mightiest levers for all independent development of the proletariat, will probably shorten the process, acting in concert with foreign competition and the deepening ruin of the lower middle-class.  I think the people will not endure more than one more crisis.  The next one, in 1846 or 1847, will probably bring with it the repeal of the Corn Laws {296} and the enactment of the Charter.  What revolutionary movements the Charter may give rise to remains to be seen.  But, by the time of the next following crisis, which, according to the analogy of its predecessors, must break out in 1852 or 1853, unless delayed perhaps