le to such bare facts as serve
to characterise the condition of the English proletariat.

The earliest, crudest, and least fruitful form of this rebellion was that
of crime. The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others
were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did
more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under
these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the
sacredness of property, and he stole. We have seen how crime increased
with the extension of manufacture; how the yearly number of arrests bore
a constant relation to the number of bales of cotton annually consumed.

The workers soon realised that crime did not help matters. The criminal
could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one
individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each
criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, theft
was the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no
other, it never became the universal expression of the public opinion of
the working-men, however much they might approve of it in silence. As a
class, they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they
resisted the introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the
industrial period. The first inventors, Arkwright and others, were
persecuted in this way and their machines destroyed. Later, there took
place a number of revolts against machinery, in which the occurrences
were almost precisely the same as those of the printers' disturbances in
Bohemia in 1844; factories were demolished and machinery destroyed.

This form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain
localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social
arrangements. When the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of
social power fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to
its heart's content, while the machinery was introduced none the less. A
new form of opposition had to be found.

At this point help came in the shape of a law enacted by the old,
unreformed, oligarchic-Tory parliament, a law which never could have
passed the House of Commons later, when the Reform Bill had legally
sanctioned the distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and made
the bourgeoisie the ruling class. This was enacted in 1824, and repealed
all laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour p