rk, either through want of employment
or through dissensions with their employers. Thus the working-men are
constantly coming to see more clearly that, united, they too are a
respectable power, and can, in the last extremity, defy even the might of
the bourgeoisie. And this insight, the gain of all labour movements, has
been won for all the miners of England by the Union and the strike of
1844. In a very short time the difference of intelligence and energy
which now exists in favour of the factory operatives will have vanished,
and the miners of the kingdom will be able to stand abreast of them in
every respect. Thus one piece of standing ground after another is
undermined beneath the feet of the bourgeoisie; and how long will it be
before their whole social and political edifice collapses with the basis
upon which it rests? {259}

But the bourgeoisie will not take warning. The resistance of the miners
does but embitter it the more. Instead of appreciating this forward step
in the general movement of the workers, the property-holding class saw in
it only a source of rage against a class of people who are fools enough
to declare themselves no longer submissive to the treatment they had
hitherto received. It saw in the just demands of the non-possessing
workers only impertinent discontent, mad rebellion against "Divine and
human order;" and, in the best case, a success (to be resisted by the
bourgeoisie with all its might) won by "ill-intentioned demagogues who
live by agitation and are too lazy to work." It sought, of course,
without success, to represent to the workers that Roberts and the Union's
agents whom the Union very naturally had to pay, were insolent swindlers,
who drew the last farthing from the working-men's pockets. When such
insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by
its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous
signs of the times, surely all hope of a peaceful solution of the social
question for England must be abandoned. The only possible solution is a
violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place.

THE AGRICULTURAL PROLETARIAT.

We have seen in the introduction how, simultaneously with the small
bourgeoisie and the modest independence of the former workers, the small
peasantry also was ruined when the former Union of industrial and
agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together
into large farms, and