“Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only.  The immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand.  Every ten years the march of industry was violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a long period of chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending in feverish over-production and consequent renewed collapse.  The capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of the towns back to the country districts whence they came, to invade them, as John Bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army quartered upon the enemy.  The working masses of the towns demanded their share of political power—­the People’s Charter; they were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between the two was whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by moral force.  Then came the commercial crash of 1847 and the Irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution

“The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class.  The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened the small middle-class of England and disorganised the narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English working-class.  At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally, before even it collapsed externally on the 10th of April, 1848.  The action of the working-class was thrust into the background.  The capitalist class triumphed along the whole line.

“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy.  The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest,—­bankers, stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc.  Free Trade meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists—­the class which now represented the nation.  And they set about this task with a will.  Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed.  The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised.  Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist:  the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working-class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down—­if not as yet the bringing down—­of wages.  England was to become the ’workshop of the world;’ all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was,—­markets