me in 1844--are more and more
breaking up England's industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young
as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid
rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment
arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in
1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking.
True, the external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in
America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and
the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same
order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-
day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and
children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the
cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the "bosses" as a
means of domination over the workers. When I received, in 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.

It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical
standpoint of this book--philosophical, economical, political--does not
exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international
Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost
exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My
book represen