Thus it will be seen that the hundred years from 1750, or the accession of George III. in 1760, to the collapse of the Chartist movement in 1848, was a period of continuous, and at times, embittered struggle on the part of the working classes, first for political, and next for social as well as political rights.

The loss of the American Colonies, though serious from many points of view, did not gravely injure our trade; what mischief was done, in fact, was more than made up by the conquest of India, and the establishment of our maritime supremacy over France, Spain, and Holland. The long war with France no doubt set back political and social progress, and greatly exhausted the country. But here again our conquests abroad, and still more the extraordinary development of the great machine industry at home, which gave us command of the markets of the world, resulted in a vast increase of national wealth after all expenditure and sacrifices had been allowed for. Unfortunately no attempt was made to secure the mass of the people against the effects of reaction at the end of the war, or against the inevitable results of the faulty distribution of wealth, due to the concentration of the means of production in so few hands. Hence the riots, the turbulence, and at length the organised but futile revolt of the workers as shown in the Chartist movement.

The Reform Bill of 1832 gave power into the hands of the middle class completely, as the Civil War of the seventeenth century and accession of William III. had given it partially; and this, the result of a compromise in which the workers who had formed the propelling power were left with the shells, whilst their middle-class allies took the oyster, has been paraded as a glorious political victory for the people.

Even the success of the working classes in restricting the hours of labour was not achieved without outrages which frightened the whole community. There was a manifest antagonism between the wage-earners and their masters, which, but for extraneous circumstances, might easily have led to a grave social war. But the main point is that from the end of the French war until 1848, a period which we have almost come to consider as one of perpetual peace and prosperity, because there were no European complications of importance, England was suffering from continuous internal turmoil more than any other great power. The middle class remained masters of the field in the end, it is true; but none the less the wage-earners had opened the campaign against the capitalists, which, though conducted in very tame fashion of late years, can scarcely fail to lead to grave difficulty in the near future, unless singular discretion is used by the luxurious classes.

As it was, the great Revolutionary wave of '48 produced little effect in this country. Then, for the first time, it became apparent to keen observers, that, apart even from the economical issues involved, nothing short of an international combination among the working classes of Europe could possibly secure for them political victory. At the outset success seemed probable. But although in Paris, Utopian Socialist experiments were tried in earnest, and all over Europe kings were toppled from their thrones and Republics took their place, there can be no doubt that the movement was, in the main, more national than social. The ideas of nationalist middle-class men, such as Mazzini, Kossuth, or Blind, had far more influence than the far-reaching views of international socialists. Gradually, therefore, each people was in turn subdued by the help of the military force of its

neighbour, barbarous Russia leading the reactionary host. The French bourgeois Republic drove the Italian Republicans from Rome, the Hungarians helped to defeat the Croats, and England, not yet recovered from the Chartist scare or the Irish rising, was content to mutter liberal principles under her breath, and leave those whom we had promised to assist to be crushed without our aid. All this, however, is but a portion of middle-class history. The workers were beaten back to their hovels and workshops all over the civilised world. In 1848, as in 1789, the bourgeoisie had the organisation, the money, and an accurate knowledge of their own objects.

Yet those who held that in England, at least, a great social upheaval was inevitable, had some justification for their opinion. The awful famine of 1847 in Ireland had been followed by an organised revolt, which seemed more formidable than it really was, and the crisis of the same year had intensified the contrasts here at home. England with its great factories and impoverished workpeople, its great landlords and miserable agricultural labourers, its political freedom and social oppression, its balanced constitution and general disfranchisement, seemed the very country where such ideas as those embodied in the famous Socialist manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would find acceptance. The first point in that programme, Nationalisation of the Land, had been handed on from Thomas Spence to the most active of the Chartist leaders, the Irish in the great cities openly sympathised with their brethren on the other side of St George's Channel, and for the time were at one with English revolutionists. short, the situation looked so threatening that the upper and middle classes drew together in anticipation of grave trouble,

In

regarding every meeting of Trade Union representatives as indicative of organised revolt. Wild schemes of all sorts were discussed among the workers. Nevertheless with April 10th, 1848, all the serious agitation may be said to have come to an end, and for the leaders there was nothing left save to try to educate the working classes of their countrymen up to a higher standard of social and political intelligence. A few may still be found who are imbued with the teaching of the men of '48; but the mass of Englishmen of the producing class are at present far behind their brethren on the continent of Europe and in America, in all the qualities which can eventually lead to the emancipation of their fellows. A new generation, however, is now rising up, and new economical forces are at work which will probably renew in more formidable shape the agitations of the first half of the present century before its close.

CHAPTER VII.

THE GREAT MACHINE INDUSTRY.

By the introduction of the great machine industry, where steam or water power replaced the motive power of human beings or animals, capital necessarily became more completely master of the situation than ever. From the end of the eighteenth century until the present time the economical history of England has been little more than the record of its conquests, and the annals of the increase of its domination, together with the growth of resistance by the workers. Middle-class economists define capital as simply the accumulation of the results of past labour devoted to assist present production. This is of course true, in a certain sense. Where capital, in the form of accumulated labour, belongs to the family or household, it is used for the benefit of all members of that family or household. So with the wider circle of a village community or tribe, where the accumulation of past labour is turned to the advantage of all who belong to the village, tribe, or collection of tribes, whose members live in collective communities, and all gain by the common industry.

But capital, in our modern sense, is something quite different from the results of past labour accumulated to serve the purposes of all. It constitutes an epoch in social production when the accumulated labour and the means of production, including the land, are in the hands of