and that of the nation lies.  He knows, too, what the especial interest of the bourgeoisie is, and what he has to expect of that bourgeoisie.  If he cannot write he can speak, and speak in public; if he has no arithmetic, he can, nevertheless, reckon with the Political Economists enough to see through a Corn-Law-repealing bourgeois, and to get the better of him in argument; if celestial matters remain very mixed for him in spite of all the effort of the preachers, he sees all the more clearly into terrestrial, political, and social questions.  We shall have occasion to refer again to this point; and pass now to the moral characteristics of our workers.

It is sufficiently clear that the instruction in morals can have no better effect than the religious teaching, with which in all English schools it is mixed up.  The simple principles which, for plain human beings, regulate the relations of man to man, brought into the direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment.  The schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and especially of the Children’s Employment Commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class.  So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is the English bourgeoisie in its egotism, that it does not even take the trouble to impress upon the workers the morality of the day, which the bourgeoisie has patched together in its own interest for its own protection!  Even this precautionary measure is too great an effort for the enfeebled and sluggish bourgeoisie.  A time must come when it will repent its neglect, too late.  But it has no right to complain that the workers know nothing of its system of morals, and do not act in accordance with it.

Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as well as physically and mentally.  The only provision made for them is the law, which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious to the bourgeoisie.  Like the dullest of the brutes, they are treated to but one form of education, the whip, in the shape of force, not convincing but intimidating.  There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power.  They are men so long only as they burn with wrath against the reigning class.  They become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke.