which
already competes with England in the coarser cotton goods, has excluded
the English from the markets of North and South America, and holds its
own in China, side by side with England. If any country is adapted to
holding a monopoly of manufacture, it is America. Should English
manufacture be thus vanquished--and in the course of the next twenty
years, if the present conditions remain unchanged, this is inevitable--the
majority of the proletariat must become forever superfluous, and has no
other choice than to starve or to rebel. Does the English bourgeoisie
reflect upon this contingency? On the contrary; its favourite economist,
M'Culloch, teaches from his student's desk, that a country so young as
America, which is not even properly populated, cannot carry on
manufacture successfully or dream of competing with an old manufacturing
country like England. It were madness in the Americans to make the
attempt, for they could only lose by it; better far for them to stick to
their agriculture, and when they have brought their whole territory under
the plough, a time may perhaps come for carrying on manufacture with a
profit. So says the wise economist, and the whole bourgeoisie worships
him, while the Americans take possession of one market after another,
while a daring American speculator recently even sent a shipment of
American cotton goods to England, where they were sold for
re-exportation!

But assuming that England retained the monopoly of manufactures, that its
factories perpetually multiply, what must be the result? The commercial
crises would continue, and grow more violent, more terrible, with the
extension of industry and the multiplication of the proletariat. The
proletariat would increase in geometrical proportion, in consequence of
the progressive ruin of the lower middle-class and the giant strides with
which capital is concentrating itself in the hands of the few; and the
proletariat would soon embrace the whole nation, with the exception of a
few millionaires. But in this development there comes a stage at which
the proletariat perceives how easily the existing power may be
overthrown, and then follows a revolution.

Neither of these supposed conditions may, however, be expected to arise.
The commercial crises, the mightiest levers for all independent
development of the proletariat, will probably shorten the process, acting
in concert with foreign competition and the deepening ruin of the low