ciousness of oppression awakens,
and the workers attain social and political importance. The great cities
are the birthplaces of labour movements; in them the workers first began
to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them
the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself
manifest; from them proceeded the Trades-Unions, Chartism, and Socialism.
The great cities have transformed the disease of the social body, which
appears in chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so made
manifest its real nature and the means of curing it. Without the great
cities and their forcing influence upon the popular intelligence, the
working-class would be far less advanced than it is. Moreover, they have
destroyed the last remnant of the patriarchal relation between working-
men and employers, a result to which manufacture on a large scale has
contributed by multiplying the employes dependent upon a single employer.
The bourgeoisie deplores all this, it is true, and has good reason to do
so; for, under the old conditions, the bourgeois was comparatively secure
against a revolt on the part of his hands. He could tyrannise over them
and plunder them to his heart's content, and yet receive obedience,
gratitude, and assent from these stupid people by bestowing a trifle of
patronising friendliness which cost him nothing, and perhaps some paltry
present, all apparently out of pure, self-sacrificing, uncalled-for
goodness of heart, but really not one-tenth part of his duty. As an
individual bourgeois, placed under conditions which he had not himself
created, he might do his duty at least in part; but, as a member of the
ruling class, which, by the mere fact of its ruling, is responsible for
the condition of the whole nation, he did nothing of what his position
involved. On the contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his own
individual advantage. In the patriarchal relation that hypocritically
concealed the slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an
intellectual zero, totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private
individual. Only when estranged from his employer, when convinced that
the sole bond between employer and employe is the bond of pecuniary
profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood not the
slightest test, had wholly fallen away, then only did the worker begin to
recognise his own interests and develop independently; then only did he
c