troduction of steam. The worker's
activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself
becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field
for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him
from thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work
which takes his whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat
and sleep, none for physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment
of Nature, much less for mental activity, how can such a sentence help
degrading a human being to the level of a brute? Once more the worker
must choose, must either surrender himself to his fate, become a "good"
workman, heed "faithfully" the interest of the bourgeoisie, in which case
he most certainly becomes a brute, or else he must rebel, fight for his
manhood to the last, and this he can only do in the fight against the
bourgeoisie.

And when all these conditions have engendered vast demoralisation among
the workers, a new influence is added to the old, to spread this
degradation more widely and carry it to the extremest point. This
influence is the centralisation of the population. The writers of the
English bourgeoisie are crying murder at the demoralising tendency of the
great cities, like perverted Jeremiahs, they sing dirges, not over the
destruction, but the growth of the cities. Sheriff Alison attributes
almost everything, and Dr. Vaughan, author of "The Age of Great Cities,"
still more to this influence. And this is natural, for the propertied
class has too direct an interest in the other conditions which tend to
destroy the worker body and soul. If they should admit that "poverty,
insecurity, overwork, forced work, are the chief ruinous influences,"
they would have to draw the conclusion, "then let us give the poor
property, guarantee their subsistence, make laws against overwork," and
this the bourgeoisie dare not formulate. But the great cities have grown
up so spontaneously, the population has moved into them so wholly of its
own motion, and the inference that manufacture and the middle-class which
profits from it alone have created the cities is so remote, that it is
extremely convenient for the ruling class to ascribe all the evil to this
apparently unavoidable source; whereas the great cities really only
secure a more rapid and certain development for evils already existing in
the germ. Alison is humane enough to admit this; he is no thor