of the dwellings is poverty-stricken in various degrees, down to the utter absence of even the most necessary furniture.  The clothing of the workers, too, is generally scanty, and that of great multitudes is in rags.  The food is, in general, bad; often almost unfit for use, and in many cases, at least at times, insufficient in quantity, so that, in extreme cases, death by starvation results.  Thus the working-class of the great cities offers a graduated scale of conditions in life, in the best cases a temporarily endurable existence for hard work and good wages, good and endurable, that is, from the worker’s standpoint; in the worst cases, bitter want, reaching even homelessness and death by starvation.  The average is much nearer the worst case than the best.  And this series does not fall into fixed classes, so that one can say, this fraction of the working-class is well off, has always been so, and remains so.  If that is the case here and there, if single branches of work have in general an advantage over others, yet the condition of the workers in each branch is subject to such great fluctuations that a single working-man may be so placed as to pass through the whole range from comparative comfort to the extremest need, even to death by starvation, while almost every English working-man can tell a tale of marked changes of fortune.  Let us examine the causes of this somewhat more closely.

COMPETITION.

We have seen in the introduction how competition created the proletariat at the very beginning of the industrial movement, by increasing the wages of weavers in consequence of the increased demand for woven goods, so inducing the weaving peasants to abandon their farms and earn more money by devoting themselves to their looms.  We have seen how it crowded out the small farmers by means of the large farm system, reduced them to the rank of proletarians, and attracted them in part into the towns; how it further ruined the small bourgeoisie in great measure and reduced its members also to the ranks of the proletariat; how it centralised capital in the hands of the few, and population in the great towns.  Such are the various ways and means by which competition, as it reached its full manifestation and free development in modern industry, created and extended the proletariat.  We shall now have to observe its influence on the working-class already created.  And here we must begin by tracing the results of competition of single workers with one another.

Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society.  This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes.  Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and