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 terms.  They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final.  They are the model working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.

“But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower.  The East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work.  And so in all other large towns—abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural districts.  The law which reduces the value of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law which reduces its average price, as a rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws act upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which crushes them between its wheels.

“This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy of 1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing

capitalists.  But, then, a change came.  The crash of 1866 was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last.  We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry.  Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it.  A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years.  How is this?

“The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world.  And the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion.  The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals.  And other countries beside England,—France, Belgium, Germany, America, even Russia,—have coals.  And the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists.  They set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is, that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up.

“But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the present social system of England.  Even while that monopoly lasted, the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence.  And new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery, and Birmingham hardware.  How will it be when Continental, and especially American, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities—when the predominating share, still held by British manufacturers, will become reduced from year to year?  Answer, Free Trade, thou universal panacea.

“I am not the first to point this out.  Already, in 1883, at the

Southport meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the President of the Economic section, stated plainly that ‘the days of great trade profits in England were over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of industrial labour.  The country might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state.’

“But what is to be the consequence?  Capitalist production cannot stop.  It must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die.  Even now, the mere reduction of England’s lion’s share in the supply of the world’s markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workpeople there.  What will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop?

“Here is the vulnerable place, the heel of Achilles, for capitalistic production.  Its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion, and this constant expansion now becomes impossible.  It ends in a deadlock.  Every year England is brought nearer face to face with the question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist production must.  Which is it to be?

“And the working-class?  If even under the unparalleled commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1866, they have had to undergo such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged, ‘protected’ minority was permanently benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its intensified condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of English trade?

“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly.  These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then.  And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England.  With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will

lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally—the privileged and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its fellow-workers abroad.  And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England.”

To this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me in 1885, I have but little to add.  Needless to say that to-day there is indeed “Socialism again in England,” and plenty of it—Socialism of all shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and poetic, Socialism of the working-class and of the middle-class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses.  That shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of “society,” middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we Socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion.  At the same time, we have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself.

What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally, that is the revival of the East End of London.  That immense haunt of misery is no longer