had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People’s Charter.

“For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing capitalists were at first startling.  Trade revived and extended to a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working power concentrated in the large towns.  The progress was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well as in 1866; but these revulsions were now considered as natural, inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which always set themselves right in the end.

“And the condition of the working-class during this period?  There was temporary improvement even for the great mass.  But this improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of bands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more and more superseded by machines.

“A permanent improvement can be recognised for two ‘protected’ sections only of the working-class.  Firstly, the factory hands.  The fixing by Act of Parliament of their working-day within relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration.  They are undoubtedly better off than before 1848.  The best proof is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production.  You can never get the masters to agree to work ‘short time,’ let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.

“Secondly, the great Trades’ Unions.  They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable.  Here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength.  The engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery.  That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact, that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good