eral party had enacted the New Poor Law; the Conservative
party, with its Prime Minister Peel at the head, defends it, and only
alters some petty-fogging trifles in the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1844.
A Liberal majority carried the bill, a Conservative majority approved it,
and the "Noble Lords" gave their consent each time. Thus is the
expulsion of the proletariat from State and society outspoken, thus is it
publicly proclaimed that proletarians are not human beings, and do not
deserve to be treated as such. Let us leave it to the proletarians of
the British Empire to re-conquer their human rights. {293}

Such is the state of the British working-class as I have come to know it
in the course of twenty-one months, through the medium of my own eyes,
and through official and other trustworthy reports. And when I call this
condition, as I have frequently enough done in the foregoing pages, an
utterly unbearable one, I am not alone in so doing. As early as 1833,
Gaskell declared that he despaired of a peaceful issue, and that a
revolution can hardly fail to follow. In 1838, Carlyle explained
Chartism and the revolutionary activity of the working-men as arising out
of the misery in which they live, and only wondered that they have sat so
quietly eight long years at the Barmecide feast, at which they have been
regaled by the Liberal bourgeoisie with empty promises. And in 1844 he
declared that the work of organising labour must be begun at once "if
Europe or at least England, is long to remain inhabitable." And the
_Times_, the "first journal of Europe," said in June, 1844: "War to
palaces, peace unto cabins--that is a battle-cry of terror which may come
to resound throughout our country. Let the wealthy beware!"

* * * * *

Meanwhile, let us review once more the chances of the English
bourgeoisie. In the worst case, foreign manufacture, especially that of
America, may succeed in withstanding English competition, even after the
repeal of the Corn Laws, inevitable in the course of a few years. German
manufacture is now making great efforts, and that of America has
developed with giant strides. America, with its inexhaustible resources,
with its unmeasured coal and iron fields, with its unexampled wealth of
water-power and its navigable rivers, but especially with its energetic,
active population, in comparison with which the English are phlegmatic
dawdlers,--America has in less than ten years created a manufacture