1886 , the American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but to read my own description of the North of England colliers’ strike of 1844 . The same cheating of the workpeople by false measure; the same truck-system; the same attempt to break the miners’ resistance by the capitalists’ last, but crushing, resource—the eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.
I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, or to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since 1844 . And for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the book must be about doubled; and, secondly, the first volume of Das Kapital , by Karl Marx, an English translation of which is before the public, contains a very ample description of the state of the British working-class, as it was about 1865 , that is to say, at the time when British industrial prosperity reached its culminating point. I should, then, have been obliged again to go over the ground already covered by Marx’s celebrated work.