Preface

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