tion with later improvements. And who else is
there to bear the hardship? The manufacturer will not throw out his old
apparatus, nor will he sustain the loss upon it; out of the dead
mechanism he can make nothing, so he fastens upon the living worker, the
universal scapegoat of society. Of all the workers in competition with
machinery, the most ill-used are the hand-loom cotton weavers. They
receive the most trifling wages, and, with full work, are not in a
position to earn more than ten shillings a week. One class of woven
goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and hand-weaving is the
last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in other branches, so
that the trade is always overcrowded. Hence it comes that, in average
seasons, the hand-weaver counts himself fortunate if he can earn six or
seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his loom
fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most woven goods require moreover a
damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in part, for this
reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them from paying
for better dwellings, the workrooms of these weavers are usually without
wooden or paved floors. I have been in many dwellings of such weavers,
in remote, vile courts and alleys, usually in cellars. Often
half-a-dozen of these hand-loom weavers, several of them married, live
together in a cottage with one or two workrooms, and one large sleeping-
room. Their food consists almost exclusively of potatoes, with perhaps
oatmeal porridge, rarely milk, and scarcely ever meat. Great numbers of
them are Irish or of Irish descent. And these poor hand-loom weavers,
first to suffer from every crisis, and last to be relieved from it, must
serve the bourgeoisie as a handle in meeting attacks upon the factory
system. "See," cries the bourgeois, triumphantly, "see how these poor
creatures must famish, while the mill operatives are thriving, and _then_
judge the factory {140} system!" As though it were not precisely the
factory system and the machinery belonging to it which had so shamefully
crushed the hand-loom weavers, and as though the bourgeoisie did not know
this quite as well as ourselves! But the bourgeoisie has interests at
stake, and so a falsehood or two and a bit of hypocrisy won't matter
much.

Let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and
more supersedes the work of men. The human labour, involved in