Such is the state of the British working-class as I have come to know it in the course of twenty-one months, through the medium of my own eyes, and through official and other trustworthy reports. And when I call this condition, as I have frequently enough done in the foregoing pages, an utterly unbearable one, I am not alone in so doing. As early as 1833 , Gaskell declared that he despaired of a peaceful issue, and that a revolution can hardly fail to follow. In 1838 , Carlyle explained Chartism and the revolutionary activity of the workingmen as arising out of the misery in which they live, and only wondered that they have sat so quietly eight long years at the Barmecide feast, at which they have been regaled by the Liberal bourgeoisie with empty promises. And in 1844 he declared that the work of organising labour must be begun at once “if Europe or at least England, is long to remain inhabitable.” And the Times , the “first journal of Europe,” said in June, 1844 : “War to palaces, peace unto cabins—that is a battle-cry of terror which may come to resound throughout our country. Let the wealthy beware!”
Meanwhile, let us review once more the chances of the English bourgeoisie. In the worst case, foreign manufacture, especially that of America, may succeed in withstanding English competition, even after the repeal of the Corn Laws, inevitable in the course of a few years. German manufacture is now making great efforts, and that of America has developed with giant strides. America, with its inexhaustible resources, with its unmeasured coal and iron fields, with its unexampled wealth of waterpower and its navigable rivers, but especially with its energetic, active population, in comparison with which the English are phlegmatic dawdlers—America has in less than ten years created a manufacture which already competes with England in the coarser cotton goods, has excluded the English from the markets of North and South America, and holds its own in China, side by side with England. If any