works for wages under freedom of contract the whole of his labour seems to be fairly paid for, no matter how many hours he works, or how much unpaid surplus labour-value his employer may grind out of him. In the one case necessary and unnecessary labour, reproduction of the value of necessary food, &c., and surplus value-are all lumped together in the entire product of forced work; in the other case necessary and unnecessary labour are lumped together as the paid work of the free workman.* Yet in both instances the owner of the means of production owns likewise the entire product when completed, and the labourer, whether bond or free, works, on the average, for the bare necessaries of life in the social conditions of his time.

If a labourer reproduces the value of his wages in the first one-third of his day's work on the farm, in the mine, or in the factory, then during his whole time every stroke he does is one-third for himself and two-thirds for the employing class. Or, to put it in another way, he has the produce of two days' work in the week for himself, and four days' work goes for nothing to the employers-or rather goes to them, as a middle-class economist would say, for organising his labour or for wages of superintendence.

In slavery or serfdom no such economical sophistry is thought necessary. There the hard-hearted truth appears in all its nakedness, that the worker is compelled to do so much work for his master or feudal superior by stripes or starvation.

The slave in the West Indies and in the Southern States was, on the average, fed far better, even in the worst times, than the English agricultural labourer. By the law of 1829, he was to work only 45 hours a week in the West Indies, when our wage slaves were working unlimited hours on worse food.

There is a comparison at hand which makes the matter easily intelligible. Under the old system of forced labour or corvée a man was obliged to give one or two days' work in the week to his feudal lord without any return. Such a man, though he had the other five or six days wholly to himself, we now consider to have been practically a slave. But under the capitalist system a labourer is actually forced to give to the owners of the means of production and their hangers-on -the landowners, capitalists, bankers, profitmongers, bond-holders, mortgagees, lawyers, merchants, to the bourgeoisie in short-four days' work in the week without receiving any payment for it. Yet this man is called free though he gives four times as much labour for nothing in the week to his employer as the serf, who works gratuitously for one day in the week, is obliged to give his lord in unpaid labour. But the forced, extra, unpaid labour for the capitalist class escapes notice under the wages system, though the industrial corvée is really four times greater than the other, and in the example given the capitalist is four times as heavy a master as the feudal lord.

This is the system which gained complete predominance in English production at the end of the eighteenth century. Capital represents, therefore, an epoch in social production, and expresses a whole system of definite social relations. It does not exert its full power until the instruments of production are concentrated in the hands of one class, who then necessarily can obtain possession of all future improvements; whilst the members of another class, deprived of the means of production, either as individuals or as parts of the community, are obliged to sell their force of labour in the market in order to gain, on the average, but a bare subsistence, and render more and more surplus value-rent,

profit, interest-to those who buy their labour and live upon it. Never at any previous period has capital in this form obtained complete control of any human society; yet what is really in the present shape only two hundred years old is frequently spoken of as eternal; and the competitive, ideas which are the necessary growth of the society in which we live, just as the ideas of personal superiority and ecclesiastical hierarchy were the ideas of the middle ages, are applied to all the centuries, and treated as if they must necessarily be permanent.

Unfortunately the full explanation of surplus value, the exposition of how it is that, under the guise of freedom, the workers hand over the bulk of the value they produce to other classes for nothing was not fully given until within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years. Even now the overwhelming majority of employers and employed are either ignorant of the truth or cannot understand it. Had mankind seen two or three hundred years ago, or even a hundred years ago, that the growth of capital, the increased socialisation of labour, and the extension of exchange at the command of the individual, could not but mean the slavery of the producing class, some remedy might have been provided to control the development for the common good. But in a class struggle it is not reason but force that wins the day. From the date of about a hundred years ago force, economical, social, and political, became more and more at the disposal of capitalists either in one way or another. Their power extended over the whole field with a rapidity quite unexampled in the records of any other age or country; and before any steps were taken to regulate the process in

The capitalist system in ancient Rome so vividly depicted by Mommsen was different in kind, though similar in effects produced.

the interests of the nation at large, the class struggle which hitherto has been the necessary companion or fore-runner of all progress had begun. The endeavours of the middle class to obtain control of the political, as they practically had of the economical, and in the strict sense social sphere of action, were accompanied by hopeless efforts to keep back their extending power from below. A fight between the proletariat and the middle class has kept pace step by step with the more manifest antagonism between the capitalist or mercantile class and the landowner.

All was now ready for the introduction of machine industry in England, but by the light of the above explanations of the simpler phenomena relating to surplus value, the whole evolution will be followed more easily; and the risings of the workers against the capitalists, their apparently meaningless destruction of machinery, their furious insistance upon the right of combination, barely won as yet, their efforts for a reasonable day's work, can at least be cleared from calculated middle-class misrepresentation. Individual competition unregulated either by collective ordinance or by any thought for the general good governs alike production and exchange under the laissez-faire capitalist system of "freedom of contract." This freedom of contract is still accepted as the economical gospel by the leaders of our political parties and our principal political economists, though all can see that the tendency of the modern legislation carried out by these very statesmen and economists is in direct opposition to their own theories. Such is the irony of our modern society, the one object of the possessing classes being not to understand and prepare for the necessary evolution, but to disguise it and retard it to the fullest extent possible.

CHAPTER V.

THE GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT.

THE social and industrial history of England from the year 1750 or thereabouts divides itself into two periods, though properly speaking of course it forms one continuous record. But assuming a division for the purpose of greater convenience in dealing with the facts, the first period would extend from the introduction of machinery up to the repeal of the Corn Laws and the collapse of the Chartist and Socialist movement that is from 1760 to 1848: the second would reach from 1848 to the present date. The political history of the time must necessarily be dealt with separately. Great as was the effect upon this country of the revolt of the American colonies, of the French Revolution, and the long war which followed, the change in the method of production which was going on all the while was even more important, and brought about in the long run still more serious results.

In England our revolution at the end of the last century was industrial; whilst that of France was in the main political, and that of Germany philosophical. Each no doubt has ultimately reacted upon the other, but it is possible to follow the course of the development of the great machine industry in England, the growth of the powerful capitalist class on the one hand, and of the proletariat or hand-to-mouth wageearners on the other, without reference to what went on,