unless they pawn a part of them (as the employers
very well know), redeeming them at a loss; or if they cannot redeem the
materials, they must appear before a Justice of the Peace, as happened a
sewing-woman in November, 1843. A poor girl who got into this strait and
did not know what to do next, drowned herself in a canal in 1844. These
women usually live in little garret rooms in the utmost distress, where
as many crowd together as the space can possibly admit, and where, in
winter, the animal warmth of the workers is the only heat obtainable.
Here they sit bent over their work, sewing from four or five in the
morning until midnight, destroying their health in a year or two and
ending in an early grave, without being able to obtain the poorest
necessities of life meanwhile. {211} And below them roll the brilliant
equipages of the upper bourgeoisie, and perhaps ten steps away some
pitiable dandy loses more money in one evening at faro than they can earn
in a year.

* * * * *

Such is the condition of the English manufacturing proletariat. In all
directions, whithersoever we may turn, we find want and disease permanent
or temporary, and demoralisation arising from the condition of the
workers; in all directions slow but sure undermining, and final
destruction of the human being physically as well as mentally. Is this a
state of things which can last? It cannot and will not last. The
workers, the great majority of the nation, will not endure it. Let us
see what they say of it.

LABOUR MOVEMENTS.

It must be admitted, even if I had not proved it so often in detail, that
the English workers cannot feel happy in this condition; that theirs is
not a state in which a man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and
live as human beings. The workers must therefore strive to escape from
this brutalizing condition, to secure for themselves a better, more human
position; and this they cannot do without attacking the interest of the
bourgeoisie which consists in exploiting them. But the bourgeoisie
defends its interests with all the power placed at its disposal by wealth
and the might of the State. In proportion as the working-man determines
to alter the present state of things, the bourgeois becomes his avowed
enemy.

Moreover, the working-man is made to feel at every moment that the
bourgeoisie treats him as a chattel, as its property, and for this
reason, if for no other, he must come forward as its ene