The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892

Transcribed from the January 1943 George Allen & Unwin reprint of the
March 1892 edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
With a Preface written in 1892


by
FREDERICK ENGELS

_Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky_

_London_

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

_Museum Street_




PREFACE


The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first
issued in Germany in 1845.  The author, at that time, was young, twenty-
four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with
its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed.
It was translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F.
Kelley Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York.
The American edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been
extensively circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present English
copyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all parties
interested.

For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in
English by the author.  The first had little to do with the book itself;
it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is,
therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second--the original
preface--is largely made use of in the present introductory remarks.

The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many
respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned.  Though not
expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern
Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic
Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of
swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages.  The
pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in
Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so
well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to
be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and,
again, the commission agent, who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or
Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months,
finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had
better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and
subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native
country.  The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large
market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial
morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and
trouble.  And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer
and his "hands."

The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new
industrial epoch.  The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial reforms
subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-
room they had asked for.  The discovery of the Californian and Australian
gold-fields followed in rapid succession.  The Colonial markets developed
at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured
goods.  In India millions of hand-weavers were finally crushed out by the
Lancashire power-loom.  China was more and more being opened up.  Above
all, the United States--then, commercially speaking, a mere colonial
market, but by far the biggest of them all--underwent an economic
development astounding even for that rapidly progressive country.  And,
finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the
preceding period--railways and ocean steamers--were now worked out on an
international scale; they realised actually, what had hitherto existed
only potentially, a world-market.  This world-market, at first, was
composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries
grouped around one manufacturing centre--England--which consumed the
greater part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return
with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles.  No
wonder England's industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled, and
such that the status of 1844 now appears to us as comparatively primitive
and insignificant.  And in proportion as this increase took place, in the
same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised.
The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty
thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay.  Trade had outgrown such
low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the
manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the
competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they
could.  Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours' Bill was
enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced--much against
the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in
favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured
brother.