ef disadvantages
under which other house-owners labour; his cottages never stand empty,
and he runs no risk. But the rent of the cottages is as high as though
these disadvantages were in full force, and by obtaining the same rent as
the ordinary house-owner, the manufacturer, at cost of the operatives,
makes a brilliant investment at twelve to fourteen per cent. For it is
clearly unjust that he should make twice as much profit as other
competing house-owners, who at the same time are excluded from competing
with him. But it implies a double wrong, when he draws his fixed profit
from the pockets of the non-possessing class, which must consider the
expenditure of every penny. He is used to that, however, he whose whole
wealth is gained at the cost of his employees. But this injustice
becomes an infamy when the manufacturer, as often happens, forces his
operatives, who must occupy his houses on pain of dismissal, to pay a
higher rent than the ordinary one, or even to pay rent for houses in
which they do not live! The _Halifax Guardian_, quoted by the Liberal
_Sun_, asserts that hundreds of operatives in Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham,
and Rochdale, etc., are forced by their employers to pay house-rent
whether they occupy the house or not. {184} The cottage system is
universal in the country districts; it has created whole villages, and
the manufacturer usually has little or no competition against his houses,
so that he can fix his price regardless of any market rate, indeed at his
pleasure. And what power does the cottage system give the employer over
his operatives in disagreements between master and men? If the latter
strike, he need only give them notice to quit his premises, and the
notice need only be a week; after that time the operative is not only
without bread but without a shelter, a vagabond at the mercy of the law
which sends him, without fail, to the treadmill.

Such is the factory system sketched as fully as my space permits, and
with as little partisan spirit as the heroic deeds of the bourgeoisie
against the defenceless workers permit--deeds to wards which it is
impossible to remain indifferent, towards which indifference were a
crime. Let us compare the condition of the free Englishman of 1845 with
the Saxon serf under the lash of the Norman barons of 1145. The serf was
_glebae adscriptus_, bound to the soil, so is the free working-man
through the cottage system. The serf owed his master the _jus pri