rrow a way,
are they so dangerous to this social order. The working-men cannot
attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing order of society,
at any sorer point than this. If the competition of the workers among
themselves is destroyed, if all determine not to be further exploited by
the bourgeoisie, the rule of property is at an end. Wages depend upon
the relation of demand to supply, upon the accidental state of the labour
market, simply because the workers have hitherto been content to be
treated as chattels, to be bought and sold. The moment the workers
resolve to be bought and sold no longer, when in the determination of the
value of labour, they take the part of men possessed of a will as well as
of working-power, at that moment the whole Political Economy of to-day is
at an end.

The laws determining the rate of wages would, indeed, come into force
again in the long run, if the working-men did not go beyond this step of
abolishing competition among themselves. But they must go beyond that
unless they are prepared to recede again and to allow competition among
themselves to reappear. Thus once advanced so far, necessity compels
them to go farther; to abolish not only one kind of competition, but
competition itself altogether, and that they will do.

The workers are coming to perceive more clearly with every day how
competition affects them; they see far more clearly than the bourgeois
that competition of the capitalists among themselves presses upon the
workers too, by bringing on commercial crises, and that this kind of
competition; too, must be abolished. They will soon learn _how_ they
have to go about it.

That these Unions contribute greatly to nourish the bitter hatred of the
workers against the property-holding class need hardly be said. From
them proceed, therefore, with or without the connivance of the leading
members, in times of unusual excitement, individual actions which can be
explained only by hatred wrought to the pitch of despair, by a wild
passion overwhelming all restraints. Of this sort are the attacks with
vitriol mentioned in the foregoing pages, and a series of others, of
which I shall cite several. In 1831, during a violent labour movement,
young Ashton, a manufacturer in Hyde, near Manchester, was shot one
evening when crossing a field, and no trace of the assassin discovered.
There is no doubt that this was a deed of vengeance of the working-men.
Incendiarisms and a