industrial revolution, have from the
beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement,
and how the others have joined this movement just in proportion as their
handicraft has been invaded by the progress of machinery. We shall thus
learn from the example which England offers, from the equal pace which
the Labour Movement has kept with the movement of industrial development,
the historical significance of manufacture.

Since, however, at the present moment, pretty much the whole industrial
proletariat is involved in the movement, and the condition of the
separate sections has much in common, because they all are industrial, we
shall have first to examine the condition of the industrial proletariat
as a whole, in order later to notice more particularly each separate
division with its own peculiarities.

It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in
the hands of the few. It requires large capital with which to erect the
colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with
which to press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand
labour of the independent workman out of the market. The division of
labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the
application of machinery, are the three great levers with which
manufacture, since the middle of the last century, has been busy putting
the world out of joint. Manufacture, on a small scale, created the
middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised
the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them
the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile, it is an undenied and
easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class of the "good
old times" has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich
capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other. {20}

The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here.
Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally,
since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a
piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest
under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many
workers employed together in a single building, living near each other
and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory.
They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary;
hand