cleaning machinery in motion. Why? Because the bourgeois would
otherwise oblige the worker to clean the machinery during the free hours
while it is not going, and the worker naturally is not disposed to
sacrifice any part of his free time. Every free hour is so precious to
the worker that he often risks his life twice a week rather than
sacrifice one of them to the bourgeois. Let the employer take from
working-hours the time required for cleaning the machinery, and it will
never again occur to an operative to clean machinery in motion. In
short, from whatever point of view, the blame falls ultimately on the
manufacturer, and of him should be required, at the very least, life-long
support of the incapacitated operative, and support of the victim's
family in case death follows the accident. In the earliest period of
manufacture, the accidents were much more numerous in proportion than
now, for the machinery was inferior, smaller, more crowded, and almost
never fenced. But the number is still large enough, as the foregoing
cases prove, to arouse grave question as to a state of things which
permits so many deformities and mutilations for the benefit of a single
class, and plunges so many industrious working-people into want and
starvation by reason of injuries undergone in the service and through the
fault of the bourgeoisie.

A pretty list of diseases engendered purely by the hateful money greed of
the manufacturers! Women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed,
men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with
disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie. And
when one reads of the barbarism of single cases, how children are seized
naked in bed by the overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the
factory, their clothing over their arms, {167a} how their sleepiness is
driven off with blows, how they fall asleep over their work nevertheless,
how one poor child sprang up, still asleep, at the call of the
overlooker, and mechanically went through the operations of its work
after its machine was stopped; when one reads how children, too tired to
go home, hide away in the wool in the drying-room to sleep there, and
could only be driven out of the factory with straps; how many hundreds
came home so tired every night, that they could eat no supper for
sleepiness and want of appetite, that their parents found them kneeling
by the bedside, where they had fallen aslee