looked around him at his chamber without resources: no
food, no fuel, no furniture, and four human beings dependent on him, and
lying in their wretched beds because they had no clothes. "I cannot sell
my loom," he continued, "at the price of old firewood, and it cost me
gold. It is not vice that has brought me to this, nor indolence, nor
imprudence. I was born to labour, and I was ready to labour. I loved my
loom and my loom loved me. It gave me a cottage in my native village,
surrounded by a garden of whose claims on my solicitude it was not
jealous. There was time for both. It gave me for a wife the maiden
that I had ever loved; and it gathered my children round my hearth with
plenteousness and peace. I was content: I sought no other lot. It is not
adversity that makes me look back upon the past with tenderness.

"Then why am I here? Why am I, and six hundred thousand subjects of
the Queen, honest, loyal, and industrious, why are we, after manfully
struggling for years, and each year sinking lower in the scale, why are
we driven from our innocent and happy homes, our country cottages that
we loved, first to bide in close towns without comforts, and gradually
to crouch into cellars, or find a squalid lair like this, without even
the common necessaries of existence; first the ordinary conveniences of
life, then raiment, and, at length, food, vanishing from us.

"It is that the Capitalist has found a slave that has supplanted the
labour and ingenuity of man. Once he was an artizan: at the best, he now
only watches machines; and even that occupation slips from his grasp, to
the woman and the child. The capitalist flourishes, he amasses immense
wealth; we sink, lower and lower; lower than the beasts of burthen; for
they are fed better than we are, cared for more. And it is just, for
according to the present system they are more precious. And yet they
tell us that the interests of Capital and of Labour are identical.

"If a society that has been created by labour suddenly becomes
independent of it, that society is bound to maintain the race whose only
property is labour, from the proceeds of that property, which has not
ceased to be productive.

"When the class of the Nobility were supplanted in France, they did not
amount in number to one-third of us Hand-Loom weavers; yet all Europe
went to war to avenge their wrongs, every state subscribed to maintain
them in their adversity, and when they were restored to their own
c