proves further that the invention of the machine, with which four and
five colours are printed at once, was a result of the disturbances among
the calico printers; that the refractoriness of the yarn-dressers in the
power-loom weaving mills gave rise to a new and perfected machine for
warp-dressing, and mentions several other such cases. A few pages
earlier this same Ure gives himself a great deal of trouble to prove in
detail that machinery is beneficial to the workers! But Ure is not the
only one; in the Factory Report, Mr. Ashworth, the manufacturer, and many
another, lose no opportunity to express their wrath against the Unions.
These wise bourgeois, like certain governments, trace every movement
which they do not understand, to the influence of ill-intentioned
agitators, demagogues, traitors, spouting idiots, and ill-balanced youth.
They declare that the paid agents of the Unions are interested in the
agitation because they live upon it, as though the necessity for this
payment were not forced upon them by the bourgeois, who will give such
men no employment!

The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all to what
extent the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes,
scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction,
now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of
wages, again by reason of the employment of knobsticks or the continuance
of abuses, sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other
reasons. These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty
struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest
proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is
approaching. They are the military school of the working-men in which
they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided;
they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these
too have joined the labour movement. And when one examines a year's file
of the _Northern Star_, the only sheet which reports all the movements of
the proletariat, one finds that all the proletarians of the towns and of
country manufacture have united in associations, and have protested from
time to time, by means of a general strike, against the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie. And as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them
is developed the peculiar courage of the English. It is said on the
Continent that the