by which their masters extend their dominion
over other workers who have not yet been scientifically exploited.

The work of empire building falls to the lot of the workers. The profits
of empire building go to the exploiting class.

3. _The British Workers_

What advantage came to the workers of Rome from the Empire which their
hands shaped and which their blood cemented together? Their masters took
their farms, converted the small fields into great, slave-worked
estates, and drove the husbandmen into the alleys and tenements of the
city where they might eke out an existence as best they could. The
rank-and-file Roman derived the same advantage from the Roman Empire
that the rank-and-file Briton has derived from the British Empire.

Great Britain has exercised more world mastery during the past hundred
years than any other nation. All that Germany hoped to achieve Great
Britain has realized. Her traders carry the world's commerce, her
financiers clip profits from international business transactions, her
manufacturers sell to the people of every country, the sun never sets on
the British flag.

Great Britain is the foremost exponent and practitioner of capitalist
imperialism. The British Empire is the greatest that the world has known
since the Empire of Rome fell to pieces. Whatever benefits modern
imperialism brings either for capitalists or for workers should be
enjoyed by the capitalists and workers of Great Britain.

Until the Great World War the capitalists of Great Britain were the most
powerful on earth with a larger foreign trade and a larger foreign
investment than any other. At the same time the British workers were
amongst the worst exploited of those in any capitalist country in
Europe.

The entire nineteenth century is one long and terrible record of
master-class exploitation inside the British Isles. The miseries of
modern India have been paralleled in the lives of the workers of
Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Gibbins, in his description of the
conditions of the child workers in the early years of the nineteenth
century ends with the remark, "One dares not trust oneself to try and
set down calmly all that might be told of this awful page of the history
of industrial England."[58]

Even more revolting are the descriptions of the conditions which
surrounded the lives of the mine workers in the early part of the
nineteenth century. Women as well as men were taken into the mines and
in some