of the great mass of "unskilled" workers. This organisation
may to a great extent adopt the form of the old Unions of "skilled"
workers, but it is essentially different in character. The old Unions
preserve the traditions of the time when they were founded, and look upon
the wages system as a once for all established, final fact, which they at
best can modify in the interest of their members. The new Unions were
founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was
severely shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either
consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength,
were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working-class aristocracy;
but they had this immense advantage, that _their minds were virgin soil_,
entirely free from the inherited "respectable" bourgeois prejudices which
hampered the brains of the better situated "old" Unionists. And thus we
see now these new Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement
generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud "old"
Unions.

Undoubtedly, the East Enders have committed colossal blunders; so have
their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire Socialists who pooh-pooh
them. A large class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker
than by undergoing the consequences of its own mistakes. And for all the
faults committed in past, present, and future, the revival of the East
End of London remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this
_fin de siecle_, and glad and proud I am to have lived to see it.

F. ENGELS.
_January_ 11_th_, 1892.

INTRODUCTION

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of
the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery
for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an
industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil
society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to
be recognised. England is the classic soil of this transformation, which
was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is,
therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat.
Only in England can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and
from all sides.

We have not, here and now, to deal with the history of this revolution,
nor with its vast importance for the present and the future. Such a
delineation