In this chapter Marx considers the influence of the growth of capital on the lot of the labouring class. The most important factor in the inquiry is the composition of capital and the changes it undergoes in the course of the process of accumulation.

The composition of capital must be grasped two ways. On the side of value it is the ratio in which capital divides into constant capital — the value of the means of production — and variable capital — the value of labour-power, the total sum of wages. On the side of material, as capital functions in the process of production, it divides into means of production and living labour-power; this is determined by the ratio between the mass of means of production employed and the mass of labour required to set them in motion. Marx calls the first the value composition, the second the technical composition of capital. Between the two there is a close correlation, and he calls the value composition, insofar as it is determined by the technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic composition of capital — the sense always meant wherever "composition of capital" is used without further qualification. This is the complete, source-owned oz-def evidence for organische-zusammensetzung-des-kapitals, LIVE/APPLIED here with its one reciprocal chip; the English carrier begins in this paragraph and continues into EN p3.

The many individual capitals invested in a given branch of production differ more or less from one another in composition; the average of their individual compositions gives the composition of that branch's total capital, and the average of all branches' average compositions gives the composition of a country's social capital — the scale alone the following investigation concerns in the last instance.

Growth of capital includes growth of its variable, labour-power part: part of the surplus-value turned into additional capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital or additional labour fund. If, other circumstances remaining equal, the composition of capital stays unchanged — a given mass of means of production always requiring the same mass of labour-power to be set in motion — then the demand for labour and the workers' subsistence fund grow in proportion to capital, and the faster the faster capital grows. Since capital yearly produces a surplus-value of which part is added to the original capital, since this increment itself grows yearly with the expanding capital already functioning, and since, under special stimulus to enrichment such as new markets or new spheres of investment from newly developed social needs, the scale of accumulation can suddenly extend merely through a changed division of surplus-value into capital and revenue, the requirements of accumulation can outstrip the growth of labour-power or the number of workers, so that demand for labourers exceeds supply and wages rise. This must eventually happen even under the unchanged assumption above: since more workers are employed each year than the year before, sooner or later the point must come where accumulation's needs begin to outgrow the customary supply of labour, and wages rise. Complaints of this kind were heard in England throughout the fifteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. The more or less favourable circumstances in which wage-workers maintain and multiply themselves change nothing in the fundamental character of capitalist production. Just as simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital relation itself — capitalists on one side, wage-workers on the other — so reproduction on an expanded scale, or accumulation, reproduces the capital relation on an expanded scale: more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, more wage-workers at the other. The reproduction of labour-power, which must incessantly incorporate itself into capital as a means of its valorization, cannot break free of capital, and whose bondage to capital is only concealed by the change of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, in fact forms a moment of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is therefore increase of the proletariat. Attached German note [70] / Moore–Aveling note [1] cites Marx's own earlier volume and quotes Colins on proletarians and national wealth, then dismantles Roscher's "sickly proletarian of the primitive forest" as a pretty fancy, since the forest-dweller owns and exploits the forest as freely as an orang-utan rather than being exploited by it.

Classical economy grasped this so well that Adam Smith, Ricardo, and others, as mentioned earlier, mistakenly identified accumulation with the productive workers' consumption of the whole capitalized part of the surplus-product, or with its transformation into additional wage-labourers. Marx introduces John Bellers, writing as early as 1696.

"If anyone had a hundred thousand acres, as many pounds in money, and as much cattle, what would the rich man be without the labourer but a labourer himself? And as labourers make people rich, so the more labourers, the more rich men ... the labour of the poor is the mine of the rich," Bellers writes. Attached German note [71] / Moore–Aveling note [2] cites the page of Bellers's own text.

So too Bernard de Mandeville at the start of the eighteenth century, Marx notes, introducing the following quotation.

"Where property is sufficiently secured, it would be easier to live without money than without the poor, for who would do the work? ... As the poor are to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class raises himself above the condition he was brought up in through uncommon industry and belt-tightening, no one should hinder him; indeed it is undeniably the wisest course for every private person and family in society to be frugal, but it is in the interest of all rich nations that the greater part of the poor should never be idle, yet always spend what they earn ... Those who earn their living by daily labour have nothing to spur them to be of service except their wants, which it is prudence to relieve but folly to cure. The only thing that can make the labouring man industrious is a moderate wage: too little makes him, according to his temper, faint-hearted or desperate, too much makes him insolent and lazy ... From what has been said it follows that in a free nation where slaves are not allowed, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor. Besides, they are the never-failing source of supply for fleet and army; without them there would be no enjoyment and no country's product would be marketable. To make society" (which of course consists of non-workers) "happy and the people themselves content in mean circumstances, it is necessary that the great majority remain both ignorant and poor. Knowledge enlarges and multiplies our wants, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his needs can be satisfied," Mandeville writes. This is Mandeville's own attributed programme, not Marx's recommendation. Attached German note [72] / Moore–Aveling note [3] cites Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and quotes the Essay on Trade and Commerce on temperate living and constant employment as the road to riches for landlords, capitalists, and their political agents.

What Mandeville, an honest and clear-headed man, had not yet grasped is that the mechanism of the accumulation process itself increases, along with capital, the mass of the "labouring poor" — the wage-workers who turn their labour-power into a growing power of valorization for the growing capital, and thereby must perpetuate their relation of dependence on their own product, personified in the capitalist. On this relation of dependence, Marx introduces Sir F. M. Eden's "The State of the Poor."

"Our climate requires labour to satisfy needs, and so at least a part of society must labour unremittingly ... Some who do not labour nonetheless have the products of industry at their disposal. But these owners owe this only to civilisation and order; they are pure creatures of civil institutions," Eden writes, continuing that these institutions have recognised that the fruits of labour can be appropriated otherwise than by labour — a sentence that runs on into p11. Attached German note [73] / Moore–Aveling note [4] objects that Eden should have asked whose creature "civil institutions" themselves are: from his juridical illusion he treats law as the source of the relations of production rather than their product, and Marx cites Linguet's one-word demolition of Montesquieu's "Esprit des lois": "L'esprit des lois, c'est la propriété."

"... can be appropriated otherwise than through labour," the quotation continues. "Persons of independent fortune owe their fortune almost entirely to the labour of others, not to any superior ability of their own, which is by no means better than others'; it is not the possession of land or money, but the command over labour (the command of labour), that distinguishes the rich from the poor ... What suits the poor is not an abject or servile condition, but a state of easy and liberal dependence, and for people of property sufficient influence and authority over those who work for them ... such a state of dependence, as everyone who knows human nature is aware, is necessary for the comfort of the workers themselves," Eden writes. This normalising claim is Eden's own attributed voice, not Marx's endorsement. Attached German note [74] / Moore–Aveling note [5] cites the volume, book, chapter, and page of Eden's "State of the Poor," including its preface.

Sir F. M. Eden, Marx remarks in passing, is the only disciple of Adam Smith who accomplished anything of significance during the eighteenth century. Attached German note [75] / Moore–Aveling note [6] anticipates the reader thinking of Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on Population Marx dismisses at length as a schoolboyish, plagiarized pamphlet without a single original sentence, whose success owed entirely to party interest amid the reaction against the French Revolution, and surveys the parade of Protestant-parson population theorists — Bruckner, Wallace, Townsend, Malthus, Chalmers — against Petty's and Adam Smith's own hostility to the clergy, including the Bishop of Norwich's furious rebuke of Smith's eulogy for the atheist Hume.

Under the accumulation conditions assumed so far, the most favourable to the workers, their relation of dependence on capital takes tolerable, or as Eden says, "easy and liberal," forms. Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of capital, it only becomes more extensive: capital's sphere of exploitation and rule merely expands with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A larger part of their own swelling surplus-product, itself turned into additional capital, flows back to them as means of payment, so that they can widen the circle of their enjoyments, better furnish their consumption fund of clothes and furniture, and lay by small reserve funds of money. But just as better clothing, food, treatment, and a larger peculium do not abolish the dependence and exploitation of the slave, so little do they abolish that of the wage-worker. A rising price of labour resulting from the accumulation of capital in fact only means that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself allow it to be loosened a little. Controversies on this subject have mostly overlooked the chief point, namely the differentia specifica, the defining difference, of capitalist production. Labour-power is bought here not to satisfy, through its service or product, the personal needs of the buyer. His purpose is the valorization of his capital: the production of commodities that contain more labour than he pays for, and so contain a portion of value that costs him nothing yet is realized through the sale of the commodities. Production of surplus-value, or money-making, is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour-power is saleable only insofar as it preserves the means of production as capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a source of additional capital. The conditions of its sale, however favourable or unfavourable to the worker, therefore include the necessity of its constant resale and the constantly expanded reproduction of wealth as capital. Wages, as has been seen, by their very nature always imply the delivery of a certain quantity of unpaid labour on the worker's part. Quite apart from any rise of wages accompanying a falling price of labour, an increase in wages at best means only a quantitative decrease in the unpaid labour the worker has to perform. This decrease can never go so far as to threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts over the wage rate — and Adam Smith has already shown that on the whole, in such a conflict, the master always remains master — a rise in the price of labour springing from accumulation of capital presupposes the following alternative. Attached German note [76] / Moore–Aveling note [7] cites John Wade on the common limit to employing both industrial and rural workers: the employer's ability to draw a profit from their labour, so that a wage rate high enough to push the master's gain below the average profit ends the employment, or makes it conditional on a wage cut.

Marx introduces the first branch of the alternative: either the price of labour keeps rising because its rise does not disturb the progress of accumulation — nothing wonderful in this, Marx says, quoting Adam Smith.

"Even with diminished profit, capitals nonetheless increase, and increase even faster than before ... A great capital, though with smaller profit, generally grows faster than a small capital with great profit," Adam Smith writes (l.c. I, p. 189).

In this case it is evident that a diminution of unpaid labour in no way impairs the extension of capital's rule. Or — the other side of the alternative — accumulation slackens as a result of the rising price of labour, because the spur of gain is blunted. Accumulation decreases; but with its decrease the cause of that decrease disappears too, namely the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour-power. The mechanism of the capitalist process of production thus itself removes the obstacles it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to a level corresponding to capital's valorization needs, whether that level lies below, above, or level with the one that counted as normal before the wage increase set in. One sees: in the first case it is not a decrease in the absolute or proportional growth of labour-power or the labouring population that makes capital excessive, but conversely the increase of capital that makes exploitable labour-power insufficient. In the second case it is not an increase in the absolute or proportional growth of labour-power or the labouring population that makes capital insufficient, but conversely the decrease of capital that makes exploitable labour-power, or rather its price, excessive. These absolute movements in the accumulation of capital are reflected as relative movements in the mass of exploitable labour-power, and therefore seem to be owed to the latter's own movement. To use a mathematical expression: the magnitude of accumulation is the independent variable, the magnitude of wages the dependent one, not the reverse. In the crisis phase of the industrial cycle, the general fall of commodity prices thus expresses itself as a rise in the relative value of money, and in the phase of prosperity the general rise of commodity prices as a fall in the relative value of money. The so-called Currency School concludes from this that too much money circulates at high prices and too little at low prices — the third and fourth editions instead read that too little circulates at high prices and too much at low prices, a distinct in-text edition insertion. Its ignorance and complete misapprehension of the facts find a worthy parallel in the economists who read these phenomena of accumulation as meaning that at one time too few, at another too many, wage-labourers exist. Attached German note [77] / Moore–Aveling note [9] cites Marx's own "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" on the Currency School's errors. Moore–Aveling note [8], attached earlier within this same EN p14 span at the "too much/too little" clause, is the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's note on a Russian-edition manuscript correction — swapping "little" and "much" per the authorised French translation — and has no DE attached-note counterpart; German p16 instead carries the distinct third/fourth-edition in-text insertion reversing "zu viel"/"zu wenig" at that same clause.

The law of capitalist production underlying the supposed "natural law of population" comes down simply to this: the relation between capital, accumulation, and the wage rate is nothing but the relation between unpaid labour turned into capital and the additional paid labour required to set that additional capital in motion. It is therefore by no means a relation between two independent magnitudes — the size of capital on one hand, the number of the labouring population on the other — but rather, in the last instance, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of that same labouring population. If the mass of unpaid labour supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class grows fast enough that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, wages rise, and, other things equal, unpaid labour decreases proportionally. But as soon as this decrease touches the point where the surplus-labour feeding capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalized, accumulation flags, and the rising wage movement receives a check. The rise in the price of labour thus stays confined within limits that not only leave the foundations of the capitalist system untouched but also secure its reproduction on a growing scale. The law of capitalist accumulation, mystified into a law of nature, thus in fact only expresses that its nature excludes every decrease in the degree of exploitation of labour, or every rise in the price of labour, that could seriously endanger the steady reproduction of the capital relation and its reproduction on an ever-expanding scale. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the worker exists for the valorization needs of existing values, rather than material wealth existing for the worker's needs of development. As man in religion is governed by the products of his own mind, so in capitalist production he is governed by the products of his own hand. Attached German note [77a] / Moore–Aveling note [10] quotes von Thünen's "Der isolirte Staat" asking how the worker could pass from being capital's master, as its creator, to becoming capital's slave — a question Marx credits Thünen with asking, though he calls Thünen's own answer simply childish.

According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of social wealth nor the magnitude of capital already accumulated that produces a rise of wages, but only the continued growth of accumulation and the speed of that growth — Marx cites Adam Smith (Book I, Ch. 8) in-text for this. So far only one special phase of this process has been considered, that in which capital's increase occurs with an unchanged technical composition. But the process goes beyond this phase.

Once the general foundations of the capitalist system are given, a point is reached in the course of accumulation where the development of the productivity of social labour becomes accumulation's most powerful lever.

"The same cause," says Adam Smith, "which raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its productive powers, and to make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work." This is Smith's own attributed wording, not Marx's formulation. EN-only note [11] cites Adam Smith's Enquiry into the Nature of..., Volume I, and has no DE attached-footnote counterpart; DE names Smith inline in the paragraph instead.

Apart from natural conditions such as soil fertility, and apart from the skill of independent, isolated producers — which shows more in the quality than the quantity of their product — the social degree of labour's productivity is expressed in the relative extent of means of production that one worker, in a given time and with the same expenditure of labour-power, turns into product. The mass of means of production a worker sets in motion grows with the productivity of labour; these means play a double role, the growth of some being consequence, of others condition, of rising productivity — more raw material worked up follows from higher productivity, while more machinery, draught animals, fertilizer, and drainage pipes condition it, as does the mass of means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, and means of transport. Whether condition or consequence, the growing mass of means of production compared to the labour-power incorporated with them expresses labour's growing productivity: its increase appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour relative to the mass of means of production it moves, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour process compared with its objective factor.

This change in capital's technical composition — the growth in the mass of means of production compared with the mass of the labour-power that animates them — is reflected in its value composition, in the growth of the constant part of capital's value at the expense of its variable part. A capital originally laid out, say, 50 per cent in means of production and 50 per cent in labour-power may later, with rising productivity, be laid out 80 per cent in means of production and 20 per cent in labour-power; this law of the constant part's rising growth relative to the variable is confirmed at every step by comparative analysis of commodity prices, across economic epochs within one nation or across nations within one epoch. The relative magnitude of the price-element representing only the value of consumed means of production, the constant part, generally stands in inverse proportion to the relative magnitude of the price-element paying for labour, the variable part, as accumulation advances.

This diminution of the variable part of capital compared with the constant, or the altered composition of capital's value, however, shows the change in the composition of its material constituents only approximately. If, for example, the capital-value laid out in spinning today is 7/8 constant and 1/8 variable, while at the start of the eighteenth century it was one-half constant and one-half variable, the mass of raw material and instruments of labour that a given quantity of spinning labour productively consumes today is many hundred times greater than at the century's start. The reason is simply that, as labour's productivity grows, not only does the mass of means of production it uses increase, but their value compared with their mass falls — their value rises absolutely but not in proportion to their mass. The growth of the difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much smaller than the growth of the difference between the mass of means of production, into which the constant capital is converted, and the mass of labour-power, into which the variable is converted; the former difference grows with the latter, but to a lesser degree.

But if the progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital, it by no means thereby excludes a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose a capital-value at first divides into 50 per cent constant and 50 per cent variable, later into 80 per cent constant and 20 per cent variable; if in the meantime the original capital, say £6,000, has grown to £18,000, its variable part has grown too, from £3,000 to £3,600. But where formerly an increase of capital by 20 per cent would have sufficed to raise the demand for labour by 20 per cent, this now requires a tripling of the original capital.

Part IV showed how the development of social labour's productive power presupposes co-operation on a large scale — only on that basis can division and combination of labour be organised, means of production economised through mass concentration, instruments of labour usable only in common (such as systems of machinery) called into being, immense natural forces pressed into production's service, and the production process transformed into a technological application of science. On the basis of commodity production, where the means of production are private property and the handworker either produces commodities in isolation or sells labour-power as a commodity for lack of means of self-employment, that presupposition can be realised only through the growth of individual capitals, in the measure that society's means of production and subsistence are turned into capitalists' private property. The soil of commodity production can bear large-scale production only in capitalist form; a certain accumulation of capital in individual commodity-producers' hands is therefore the precondition of the specifically capitalist mode of production, which had to be assumed at the transition from handicraft to capitalist enterprise. This may be called primitive accumulation, because it is the historical basis rather than the historical result of specifically capitalist production — how it itself arises need not be investigated here; it is enough that it forms the starting point. But all methods for raising the social... DE p8 ends mid-sentence at "gesellschaftlichen"; DE p9 continues it ("Produktivkraft der Arbeit..."). Moore–Aveling carries both as one continuous EN p8; this rendition follows that verified merge and does not treat the DE paragraph break as an omission.

...productive power of labour that grow on this basis are at the same time methods of increased production of surplus-value or surplus-product, itself accumulation's formative element — methods, therefore, of producing capital by capital, or of its accelerated accumulation. The continuous re-transformation of surplus-value into capital appears as a growing magnitude of capital entering the production process, itself the basis of an extended scale of production, of the accompanying methods for raising labour's productive power, and of accelerated surplus-value production. If, therefore, a certain degree of capital accumulation appears as a condition of the specifically capitalist mode of production, that mode of production in turn causes an accelerated accumulation of capital; with the accumulation of capital the specifically capitalist mode of production develops, and with the specifically capitalist mode of production, the accumulation of capital. Both these economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they reciprocally give one another, that change in capital's technical composition by which the variable part becomes ever smaller compared with the constant.

Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller army of workers. Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation: as the mass of wealth functioning as capital grows, its concentration in individual capitalists' hands expands, forming the basis of large-scale production and specifically capitalist methods. The growth of social capital proceeds through the growth of many individual capitals; other circumstances remaining equal, individual capitals — and with them the concentration of means of production — grow in the proportion they form aliquot parts of the total social capital, while offshoots also break from original capitals to function as new independent capitals, the division of property within capitalist families playing a considerable role. With the accumulation of capital, the number of capitalists therefore grows more or less. Two points characterise this kind of concentration, which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with, accumulation. First: the increasing concentration of social means of production in individual capitalists' hands is, other things remaining equal, limited by the degree of growth of social wealth. Second: the part of social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists who face one another as independent, competing commodity-producers — so accumulation and its accompanying concentration are not only scattered over many points, but the growth of functioning capitals is crossed by the formation of new and the splitting of old ones. Accumulation therefore presents itself, on the one hand, as growing concentration of the means of production and of command over labour, and, on the other, as the repulsion of many individual capitals from one another.

The repulsion of the total social capital's fractions from one another, splitting it into many individual capitals, is counteracted by their attraction. This is no longer the simple concentration of means of production and command over labour identical with accumulation; it is concentration of capitals already formed, abolition of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, the transformation of many smaller into fewer larger capitals. This process differs from the first in presupposing only a changed distribution of already-existing, functioning capitals, so its scope is not bounded by the absolute growth of social wealth or by accumulation's absolute limits — capital swells to great masses in one hand here because it is lost to many hands there. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration. This passage is konzentration-zentralisation's exact anchor_passage and is LIVE/APPLIED here at c1-c4, though the card carries no evidence id and remains unchipped. Edition caveat: the local MEW/3g-4g text gives the stable, mature Konzentration/Zentralisation pair closing this passage; per Scarón's apparatus, the project-spine 2nd German edition expressed the same fusion/redistribution mechanism as "concentration proper" set against accumulation alone, without this three-way mature distinction. That German 2g wording is inferred from Scarón's Spanish apparatus, not independently verified against a German 2nd edition, and must not be silently back-projected onto the mature text given here.

The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here; a brief factual indication must suffice. The battle of competition is fought through cheapening commodities; the cheapness of commodities depends, caeteris paribus, on the productivity of labour, and this in turn on the scale of production — so larger capitals defeat smaller ones. It will be recalled that, as the capitalist mode of production develops, the minimum size of individual capital required to run a business under normal conditions grows, so smaller capitals crowd into spheres of production that large industry has seized only sporadically or incompletely; competition there rages in direct proportion to the number, and inverse proportion to the size, of the rival capitals, always ending in the ruin of many smaller capitalists, whose capitals partly pass to the victor and partly perish. Apart from this, capitalist production develops an altogether new power, the credit system, which in its beginnings creeps in furtively as accumulation's modest assistant, drawing through invisible threads the money resources scattered over society's surface, in larger or smaller masses, into individual or associated capitalists' hands, but soon becomes a new and formidable weapon in the battle of competition, and finally transforms itself into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.

To the same extent that capitalist production and accumulation develop, so too do competition and credit develop, the two most powerful levers of centralisation. Alongside this, the progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to centralisation — the individual capitals — while the expansion of capitalist production creates, on one side, the social need, and on the other, the technical means for those immense industrial undertakings whose execution depends on a prior centralisation of capital. Today, therefore, the mutual force of attraction between individual capitals and the tendency to centralisation are stronger than ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the centralising movement is determined to some degree by the magnitude of capitalist wealth already attained and the superiority of the economic mechanism, the progress of centralisation nonetheless does not depend at all on the positive growth of social capital's magnitude — and this specifically distinguishes centralisation from concentration, which is only another expression for reproduction on an extended scale. Centralisation can proceed through the mere altered distribution of already-existing capitals, through a simple change in the quantitative grouping of social capital's component parts: capital can grow here to immense masses in one hand because it is withdrawn there from many individual hands. In a given branch of business, centralisation would have reached its outermost limit if all the capitals invested there had fused into a single capital; in a given society, that limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hand of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company. German note [77b], a fourth-edition addition by Engels, is attached here at the sectoral-limit sentence: the latest English and American "trusts" already strive toward this goal by attempting to unite at least all the large-scale concerns of a branch of industry into one great joint-stock company with a practical monopoly. The corresponding EN note [12] is attached instead one paragraph earlier, at EN p12 — the shifted placement documented in en-align-u79.

Centralisation completes accumulation's work by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this last result follows from accumulation or centralisation; whether centralisation proceeds by the violent path of annexation — where certain capitals become such preponderant centres of gravitation for others that they shatter the latter's individual cohesion and then draw the scattered fragments to themselves — or occurs through the smoother process of fusing a mass of already-formed or forming capitals by means of joint-stock companies, the economic effect remains the same. The grown extent of industrial establishments everywhere forms the starting point for a more comprehensive organisation of the collective labour of many, for a broader development of its material driving forces — that is, for the progressive transformation of isolated, habitually conducted production processes into socially combined and scientifically arranged ones.

But it is clear that accumulation — the gradual increase of capital through reproduction passing from the circular into the spiral form — is a very slow procedure compared with centralisation, which need only change the quantitative grouping of social capital's integral parts. The world would still be without railways had it needed to wait until accumulation alone had brought a few individual capitals to the point of being equal to building a railway; centralisation, by means of joint-stock companies, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye. And while centralisation thus intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds the revolutions in capital's technical composition that increase its constant part at the expense of its variable part, thereby diminishing the relative demand for labour.

The masses of capital fused together overnight by centralisation reproduce and multiply like the rest, only more rapidly, and thereby become new and powerful levers of social accumulation. So when one speaks of the progress of social accumulation today, the effects of centralisation are tacitly included in it.

Additional capitals formed in the course of normal accumulation (see Ch. XXII, 1) serve chiefly as vehicles for exploiting new inventions and discoveries, and industrial improvements generally. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of its renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is likewise reborn in a perfected technical form, in which a smaller mass of labour suffices to set a larger mass of machinery and raw material in motion. The absolute reduction in the demand for labour that necessarily follows from this is naturally the greater, the more the capitals undergoing this renewal process are already massed together by virtue of the centralising movement — a mechanism kept here as context for the following section, not yet its statement of the reserve-army law.

On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts, relative to its magnitude, fewer and fewer workers. On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced in a new composition repels more and more of the workers formerly employed by it.

The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing only as its quantitative extension, is carried out, as we have seen, under a continuous qualitative change of its composition — under a constant increase of its constant part at the expense of its variable part. German note (77c), a 3rd-edition marginal note from Marx's own hand-copy added by Engels ("F.E."), is attached here: if extension is purely quantitative, then for a larger and a smaller capital in the same line of business profits stand as the sizes of the capitals advanced; but if the quantitative extension induces qualitative change, the rate of profit on the larger capital rises at the same time. The corresponding EN note [13] carries the same text at EN p1.

The specifically capitalist mode of production, the corresponding development of labour's productive power, and the resulting change in capital's organic composition do not merely keep pace with accumulation's progress or with the growth of social wealth — they advance considerably faster, because simple accumulation, the absolute extension of the total capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of its individual elements, and the technical revolution of the additional capital is accompanied by a technical revolution of the original capital. As accumulation advances, the ratio of constant to variable capital thus shifts — from 1:1 successively toward 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1 and beyond — so that, as capital grows, progressively only a third, a quarter, a fifth, a sixth, an eighth of its total value converts into labour-power against an ever-larger share into means of production. Because labour demand is tied to the variable constituent alone, it falls progressively, and at an accelerating rate, relative to the total capital's growth, even though variable capital's absolute magnitude may still grow, in a constantly diminishing proportion, and even though the intervals in which accumulation works as mere extension of production on a given technical basis keep shortening. An ever more rapidly accelerating accumulation is needed merely to absorb a given additional number of workers or to keep the already-functioning ones employed; and this growing accumulation and centralisation itself becomes, in turn, a source of renewed and still faster decline of the variable part compared with the constant. Capitalist accumulation itself, rather, and in proportion to its own energy and extent, constantly produces a relative — that is, redundant only for capital's average valorization needs — surplus working population. This closing clause is relative-uebervoelkerung's exact source-owned evidence ru-pop-surplus and carries the section's sole authorized chip, at p2 c3. The card's three binding constraints hold here without qualification: the surplus is relative to capital's needs, not an absolute Malthusian excess over resources; it is produced by accumulation's own changing composition of capital, not by a natural population law; and the "setting free" this surplus depends on (named explicitly at p5) means redundancy, never benign liberation.

Considered as social capital in its totality, accumulation's movement sometimes causes periodic change across the whole, sometimes distributes its phases simultaneously over different spheres of production. In some spheres composition changes without growth in absolute magnitude, as a result of mere concentration <3. Auflage: Zentralisation> — this mature-edition insertion is preserved exactly as apparatus within the German carrier, not a new u80 owner or chip; in others absolute capital growth is bound up with absolute decline of its variable part; in others capital grows for a time on its given technical basis and attracts additional labour power in proportion to its growth, then undergoes organic change and contracts its variable part. In every sphere the growth of the variable part, and so of the number employed, is always bound up with violent fluctuations and transitory production of surplus population, whether as the more visible repulsion of already-employed workers or the less visible but no less real difficulty in absorbing the additional labouring population through its usual channels — footnote (78), attached here and ↔ EN note [14], cites the 1861 English and Welsh census data by trade showing this uneven displacement. With the magnitude of the already-functioning social capital and its degree of growth, with the extension of the scale of production and the mass of workers set in motion, with the development of the productive power of their labour, and with the broader and fuller stream of every source of wealth, the scale itself extends on which greater attraction of workers by capital is bound up with greater repulsion of them; the rapidity of change in capital's organic composition increases, and the circle of production spheres caught up in it — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes alternately — swells. Through the accumulation of capital that they themselves produce, workers thus produce, in growing measure, the means of their own relative superfluous-making — footnote (79), attached here and ↔ EN note [15], gathers Barton, Ricardo, Jones, and Ramsay as classical economists who sensed without fully grasping this law. This is a population law peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, as indeed every particular historical mode of production has its own particular, historically valid population laws; an abstract population law exists only for plant and animal, so far as man has not intervened historically.

But if a surplus working population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this overpopulation becomes, conversely, a lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army that belongs to capital just as absolutely as if capital had bred it at its own expense; it creates, for capital's changing valorization needs, the ever-ready exploitable human material, independent of the limits of the real increase of population. With accumulation and the accompanying development of labour's productive power, capital's power of sudden expansion grows — not only because the elasticity of the already-functioning capital grows, and the absolute wealth of which capital forms only an elastic part expands, and credit, under any special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of that wealth at production's disposal as additional capital, but also because the technical conditions of the production process itself — machinery, means of transport — allow, on the largest scale, the swiftest conversion of surplus-product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth, swelling with accumulation's progress and convertible into additional capital, presses frantically into old branches of production whose market suddenly expands, or into newly opened ones, such as railways, whose need arises from the development of the old; in all such cases great masses of people must be throwable, suddenly and without interrupting production elsewhere, onto the decisive points — overpopulation supplies them. The characteristic course of modern industry — a decennial cycle, interrupted by smaller oscillations, of periods of average liveliness, production under high pressure, crisis, and stagnation — rests on the constant formation, greater or lesser absorption, and re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population; and in turn the vicissitudes of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population and become one of its most energetic reproduction agents.

This peculiar course of modern industry, met with in no earlier age of humanity, was also impossible in capitalist production's childhood, when capital's composition changed only very gradually and its accumulation was matched, on the whole, by proportionate growth in labour demand; slow as its accumulation was compared with the modern epoch, it still struck natural limits of the exploitable working population, removable only by forcible means to be discussed later. The sudden, jerky expansion of the scale of production is the precondition of its equally sudden contraction; the latter in turn evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material — an increase of workers independent of the absolute growth of population. This increase is created by the simple process that constantly "sets free" part of the workers, through methods that reduce the number of employed workers relative to increased production — a redundancy produced, never a benign liberation. The whole movement-form of modern industry thus grows out of the constant transformation of part of the working population into unemployed or half-employed hands. Political economy's superficiality shows itself, among other things, in treating the expansion and contraction of credit — a mere symptom of the industrial cycle's changing periods — as their cause; just as heavenly bodies, once thrown into a given motion, keep repeating it, so does social production once thrown into this movement of alternating expansion and contraction; effects become causes in turn, and the vicissitudes of the whole self-reproducing process take on the form of periodicity. The authorized French edition here inserts the following passage, preserved exactly: <In der autorisierten französischen Ausgabe findet sich an dieser Stelle folgende Einschaltung: "Aber erst von der Zeit an, als die mechanische Industrie so tiefe Wurzeln geschlagen hatte, daß sie auf die ganze nationale Produktion einen überwiegenden Einfluß ausübte; als durch sie der Außenhandel dem Binnenhandel den Rang abzulaufen begann; als sich der Weltmarkt sukzessive ausgedehnter Gebiete in der neuen Welt, in Asien und in Australien bemächtigte; als schließlich die industriellen Nationen, die auf die Arena traten, zahlreich genug geworden waren - erst von dieser Zeit an datierten jene sich stets wiedererzeugenden Zyklen, deren aufeinanderfolgende Phasen Jahre umfassen und die immer hinauslaufen auf eine allgemeine Krise, die Ende eines Zyklus und Ausgangspunkt eines neuen ist. Bis jetzt ist die periodische Dauer solcher Zyklen zehn oder elf Jahre, aber es gibt keinerlei Grund, diese Zahl als konstant zu betrachten. Im Gegenteil, aus den Gesetzen der kapitalistischen Produktion, wie wir sie eben entwickelt haben, muß man schließen, daß sie variabel ist und daß die Periode der Zyklen sich stufenweise verkürzen wird."> — in brief: only once mechanical industry had struck deep enough roots to dominate national production, foreign trade began outrunning domestic trade, the world market seized successive new territories, and enough industrial nations had entered the arena did these self-reproducing cycles, each running years and ending in a general crisis, begin; their period, so far ten or eleven years, is not constant and should, on capitalist production's own laws, shorten over time. This is one of the section's four verified split/merge sites: Moore–Aveling's EN p4 merges DE p4's and p5's surrounding prose into one continuous English paragraph but omits only this French-edition insertion — the section's sole genuine English omission. Once this periodicity is consolidated, even political economy grasps that producing a relative population — that is, one surplus with regard to capital's average valorization need — is a life-condition of modern industry.

"Suppose," says H. Merivale, formerly professor of political economy at Oxford, later an official of the English Colonial Office, "suppose that, on the occasion of a crisis..." — his attributed voice opens here and continues, unbroken, into the next paragraph; this is the second of the section's four verified split/merge sites: DE p6 and p7 together form a single quotation that Moore–Aveling's EN carries whole as EN p5.

"...the nation roused itself to the effort of getting rid, by emigration, of some hundred thousand superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? That at the first return of labour demand there would be a deficiency. However rapid the reproduction of people may be, it needs in any case the space of a generation to replace adult workers. Now our manufacturers' profits depend mainly on the power to exploit the favourable moment of brisk demand and so compensate themselves for the period of slackness. This power is secured to them only by command over machinery and manual labour. They must find disposable hands; they must be able, as needed, to raise or slacken the activity of their operations according to the state of the market, or they simply cannot maintain, in the hunt of competition, the advantage on which this country's wealth is founded." Footnote (80), attached here and ↔ EN note [16], cites Merivale's "Lectures on Colonization and Colonies" (1841-42), vol. I, p. 146.

Even Malthus recognizes in overpopulation — which he, in his narrow way, explains from the absolute over-growth of the labouring population rather than from its relative superfluous-making — a necessity of modern industry; this is the section's explicit anti-Malthus boundary, marking exactly where Marx's own account diverges from the attributed voice quoted next. He says:

"Prudential habits regarding marriage, carried to a certain degree among the labouring class of a country depending mainly on manufacture and trade, would be injurious to it... By the nature of population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought to market, in consequence of particular demand, until after sixteen or eighteen years have elapsed, while the conversion of revenue into capital through saving can proceed far more rapidly; a country is always exposed to having its labour-fund grow faster than its population." Footnote (81), attached here and ↔ EN note [17], cites Malthus's "Principles of Political Economy," pp. 215, 319-320, and records that Malthus there discovers, via Sismondi, the "trinity" of over-production, over-population, and over-consumption — three very delicate monsters indeed — with a cross-reference to Engels's early "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie."

Having thus explained the constant production of a relative surplus population of workers as a necessity of capitalist accumulation, political economy — fittingly, in the figure of an old maid — puts into the mouth of her capitalist's "beau idéal" (beautiful ideal) the following words, addressed to the "supernumeraries" thrown onto the pavement by their own creation of additional capital: this is the narrator's ironic frame that precedes the manufacturer's attributed voice in the next paragraph.

"We manufacturers do for you what we can, by increasing the capital on which you must subsist; and you must do the rest, by fitting your numbers to the means of subsistence." Footnote (82), attached here and ↔ EN note [18], cites Harriet Martineau, "The Manchester Strike" (1832), p. 101.

Capitalist production is by no means satisfied with the quantity of disposable labour power that the natural increase of population supplies. It requires, for its free play, an industrial reserve army independent of that natural barrier.

Until now it has been assumed that the increase or decrease of variable capital corresponds exactly to the increase or decrease of the number of workers employed — an assumption the following paragraphs now qualify.

Yet with the number of workers it commands unchanged or even reduced, variable capital can still grow if the individual worker delivers more labour and his wage therefore rises, even while the price of labour stays flat or falls, only more slowly than the mass of labour increases. The growth of variable capital then becomes an index of more labour, but not of more employed workers. Every capitalist has the absolute interest to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller rather than an equally or even more cheaply out of a larger number of workers; in the latter case the outlay of constant capital grows in proportion to the mass of labour set in motion, in the former much more slowly. The larger the scale of production, the more decisive this motive; its weight grows with the accumulation of capital.

It has been seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production and of the productive power of labour — at once cause and effect of accumulation — enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable capital, to mobilize more labour through greater extensive or intensive exploitation of individual labour powers. It has further been seen that he buys more labour powers with the same capital-value, by progressively displacing more skilled workers with less skilled, mature with immature, male with female or child labour-power.

On one hand, then, as accumulation proceeds, a larger variable capital mobilizes more labour without recruiting more workers; on the other, variable capital of the same magnitude mobilizes more labour with the same mass of labour-power; and finally, more inferior labour powers displace superior ones.

The production of a relative surplus population, or the release of workers, therefore proceeds even more rapidly than the technical revolution of the production process — itself already accelerated by accumulation's progress — and the corresponding proportional decline of the variable part of capital against the constant. If the means of production, as they grow in extent and effective power, become to a lesser degree a means of employing workers, this relation is further modified because, as labour's productive power grows, capital increases its supply of labour faster than its demand for workers. The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while conversely the increased pressure the reserve exerts, through its competition, on the employed forces the latter into overwork and submission to capital's dictates. Condemning one part of the working class to forced idleness through the other part's overwork, and vice versa, becomes a means of individual capitalist enrichment — footnote (83), attached here, quotes a Blackburn cotton-spinners' pamphlet from the 1863 cotton famine denouncing overwork forced on adult male workers by the Factory Acts while hundreds stood idle, and quotes the "Essay on Trade and Commerce" grasping, with unerring bourgeois instinct, how scarce labour under sudden demand lets workers feel and assert their own importance — and simultaneously accelerates the...

...production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding to the progress of social accumulation. How important this element is in forming the relative surplus population, England proves: its technical means for "saving" labour are colossal, yet if labour generally were tomorrow restricted to a rational measure and graded, for the different sections of the working class, by age and sex, the existing working population would be absolutely insufficient to carry on national production at its present scale — the great majority of today's "unproductive" workers would have to become "productive" ones. This page-continuation completes p17's sentence before adding the England illustration — the third of the section's four verified split/merge sites, since Moore–Aveling's EN carries DE p17 and p18 as one continuous paragraph, EN p15; the attached footnote (83) corresponds there to EN note [19].

By and large, the general movements of wages are regulated exclusively by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, corresponding to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are therefore not determined by the movement of the absolute number of the working population, but by the changing ratio in which the working class divides into active army and reserve army, by the increase and decrease of the surplus population's relative extent, by the degree to which it is now absorbed, now again set free. For modern industry, with its decennial cycle and periodic phases, further crossed as accumulation proceeds by increasingly rapid irregular oscillations, it would indeed be a fine law that made labour demand and supply follow the absolute movement of population rather than capital's own expansion and contraction according to its valorization needs — yet this is exactly the economists' dogma: wages rise from capital's accumulation, higher wages spur the working population's faster multiplication, this continues until the labour market is overfull and capital becomes relatively insufficient, wages fall and decimate the working population until capital again becomes excessive relative to it — or, as others explain it, falling wages and the correspondingly heightened exploitation again accelerate accumulation while the lower wage checks the working class's growth, so that labour supply again falls short of demand and wages rise once more. A fine method of motion this, for developed capitalist production! Before any positive growth of the really work-capable population could occur as a result of higher wages, the interval within which the industrial campaign must be waged and the battle fought and decided would have elapsed again and again.

Between 1849 and 1859, alongside falling grain prices, a practically only nominal wage rise occurred in the English agricultural districts — in Wiltshire, for instance, the weekly wage rose from 7 to 8 shillings, in Dorsetshire from 7 or 8 to 9 shillings — the result of an unusually heavy drain of the agricultural surplus population, caused by wartime demand and the massive extension of railway building, factories, and mines. The lower the wage, the more strikingly even an insignificant rise expresses itself in percentages: a rise from 20 to 22 shillings is 10 percent, but from 7 to 9 shillings is 28 4/7 percent, which sounds very handsome. The farmers howled all the same, and even the "London Economist" — footnote (84), attached here and ↔ EN note [20], cites the Economist of 21 January 1860 — prattled quite seriously of "a general and substantial advance" with regard to these starvation wages. What did the farmers do? Did they wait until the agricultural labourers, thanks to this brilliant pay, had so multiplied that their wages must fall again, as the dogmatic economic mind imagines? They introduced more machinery, and in a trice the workers were once more "redundant," to a degree that satisfied even the farmers. More capital was now invested in agriculture, in a more productive form; with this, labour demand fell not only relatively but absolutely.

That economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate the general movement of wages, or the ratio between the working class — that is, total labour power — and the total social capital, with the laws that distribute the working population among particular spheres of production. If, say, favourable conditions make accumulation especially lively in a given sphere and its profits exceed the average, additional capital presses in and labour demand and wages naturally rise there; the higher wage draws a larger part of the working population into the favoured sphere, until it is saturated with labour power and wages fall back, over time, to their earlier average level or below it if the influx was too great — then not only does immigration of workers into that branch cease, it gives way to emigration. Here the political economist believes he sees an absolute increase of workers accompanying a rise in wages, and a fall in wages accompanying an absolute increase of workers, but he really sees only the local oscillation of one sphere's labour market — only the phenomena of the working population's distribution among capital's various spheres of investment, according to capital's shifting needs.

The industrial reserve army presses on the active labour army during periods of stagnation and average prosperity, and holds its claims in check during periods of overproduction and paroxysm. Relative surplus population is thus the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour moves; it forces that law's field of action within limits absolutely suited to capital's exploitation-greed and lust for domination. Here we return to one of economic apologetics' great feats: when the introduction of new or the extension of old machinery converts a piece of variable capital into constant, the economic apologist reads this operation — which "binds" capital and thereby "sets free" workers — the other way round, as freeing capital for the worker. Only now can one fully appreciate the apologist's effrontery. What is set free are not only the workers directly displaced by the machine, but equally their replacement crews and the additional contingent that, with the usual expansion of business on its old basis, would regularly have been absorbed. All of them are now "set free," and any new, function-hungry capital can dispose over them; whether it attracts them or others, the effect on general labour demand will be nil so long as this capital suffices only to free the market of as many workers as the machines threw onto it — if it employs fewer, the number of the redundant grows; if more, general labour demand grows only by the excess of the employed over the "freed." The impulse that additional capital seeking investment would otherwise have given general labour demand is thus in every case neutralized to the extent the machine-displaced workers reach. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalist production ensures that the absolute increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, and the possible ruin of the displaced workers during the transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical with the growth of capital, nor the supply of labour with the growth of the working class, as though two forces independent of one another were acting upon each other. Les dés sont pipés. <Die Würfel sind gefälscht.> — kept here exactly as the German carrier gives it, with its bracketed German gloss; Moore–Aveling's English keeps only the French, without any gloss. Capital acts on both sides at once: if its accumulation increases labour demand on the one hand, it increases the supply of workers on the other through their "setting free," while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed forces the employed to yield more labour, making the supply of labour, to some degree, independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of demand and supply of labour on this basis completes capital's despotism. As soon, therefore, as workers learn the secret of how, in the same measure that they work more, produce more alien wealth, and the productive power of their labour grows, their very function as capital's valorization-means becomes ever more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as they therefore try, through trade unions and the like, to organize a planned cooperation between employed and unemployed, to break or weaken this natural law of capitalist production's ruinous effects on their class — capital and its sycophant, political economy, cry out at the violation of the "eternal" and so-called...

..."sacred" law of demand and supply. Every solidarity between the employed and the unemployed disturbs, in fact, the supposedly "pure" play of that law. But as soon as, in the colonies for example, adverse circumstances prevent the creation of the industrial reserve army, and with it the working class's absolute dependence on the capitalist class, capital, together with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the "sacred" law of demand and supply and seeks to prop it up by forcible means. This page-continuation completes DE p22's "ewigen ... und sozusagen heiligen" clause before the colonial close. It is the fourth of the section's four verified split/merge sites: Moore–Aveling's English carries the DE p22-p23 material split across three English rows — EN p19 gives the reserve-army-as-pivot opening, EN p20 gives the machinery/apologist argument through "Les dés sont pipés," and EN p21 continues from "Capital works on both sides" through this paragraph's colonial close, so one German paragraph pair spans three English rows rather than matching one-to-one.

Relative surplus population exists in every possible shading. Every worker belongs to it during the time he is half or not at all employed. Apart from the great, periodically recurring forms that the phase-changes of the industrial cycle stamp upon it — appearing now acutely in crises, now chronically in slack times — it continuously possesses three forms: floating, latent, and stagnant.

In the centres of modern industry — factories, manufactures, ironworks and mines, etc. — workers are now repelled, now attracted again in larger measure, so that on the whole the number employed increases, though always in a steadily diminishing ratio to the scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in floating form.

Both in the actual factories and in all the great workshops where machinery enters as a factor, or where merely the modern division of labour is carried through, masses of male workers are needed up to the completion of youth. Once that age is reached, only a very small number remain employable in the same branches, while the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population that grows with the extent of industry. Part of it emigrates, in fact merely following the emigrating capital. One consequence is that the female population grows faster than the male, teste England. That the natural increase of the mass of workers does not satisfy capital's accumulation needs, and yet at the same time exceeds them, is a contradiction of capital's own movement: it needs larger masses of workers at an earlier age, smaller masses of grown men. The contradiction is no more glaring than the other one, that a want of hands is complained of at the very time when many thousands lie on the pavement, because the division of labour chains them to one particular branch (footnote 85 ↔ EN note [21]: during the last half of 1866, 80,000-90,000 London workers were thrown out of work, yet the Factory Report for that same half-year notes that demand does not always call forth supply exactly when it is needed — much machinery stood idle last year for want of hands, "Report of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. 1866," p. 81). The consumption of labour-power by capital is besides so rapid that the worker of middle age has for the most part already more or less outlived himself. He falls into the ranks of the supernumerary, or is thrust down from a higher rung to a lower. It is precisely among the workers of large-scale industry that we meet the shortest span of life. German prints the whole of Dr. Lee's coming testimony as its own self-contained next paragraph, p4. Moore–Aveling's English instead splits this material: EN p3 ends here, EN p4 carries this consumption-of-labour-power passage down to its own bare lead-in, "Dr. Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated," and only EN p5 completes the quotation itself — the section's preserved Dr. Lee split voice.

"Dr. Lee, the health officer of Manchester, established that in that city the average lifespan of the well-to-do class is 38 years, that of the working class only 17; in Liverpool it is 35 years for the former, 15 for the latter. It follows, then, that the privileged class has a lease of life (have a lease of life) more than twice as great as that of their less-favoured fellow citizens." Footnote 85a ↔ EN note [22]: opening address to the sanitary conference, Birmingham, 14 Jan. 1875 as the German carrier dates it (the English apparatus instead gives 15 January — both printed dates are kept exactly as each language states them, not reconciled), by J. Chamberlain, then mayor of the town, now (1883) President of the Board of Trade. This quotation stands as its own paragraph in German; Moore–Aveling's English instead completes it only at EN p5, after splitting its lead-in onto the end of EN p4.

Under these circumstances the absolute growth of this fraction of the proletariat requires a form that swells its numbers even though its elements wear out quickly: hence a rapid succession of the generations of workers (a law that does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social need is met by early marriages — a necessary consequence of the conditions in which the workers of large-scale industry live — and by the premium that the exploitation of working-class children sets on their production.

As soon as capitalist production takes hold of agriculture, or to the degree that it has seized hold of it, the demand for the rural working population falls absolutely with the accumulation of the capital functioning there, without its repulsion being made up, as in non-agricultural industry, by a greater attraction. Part of the rural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into urban or manufacturing proletariat, watching for circumstances favourable to this transformation (manufacture here in the sense of all non-agricultural industry). This source of relative surplus population thus flows constantly. But its constant flow toward the towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a continually latent surplus population, whose extent becomes visible only when the outlet channels open exceptionally wide. The rural worker is therefore pressed down to the minimum wage, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism. Footnote 86 ↔ EN note [23]: the 1861 census counted 781 towns in England and Wales holding 10,960,998 inhabitants against only 9,105,226 in the villages and rural parishes; of the 580 towns distinguished in the 1851 census, whose population had then been roughly equal to that of their surrounding rural districts, the surrounding country grew by only half a million over the following decade while the towns grew by 1,554,067 — a rural growth rate of 6.5 percent against an urban 17.3 percent, three-quarters of the total population increase falling to the towns.

The third category of relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms part of the active labour army, but with thoroughly irregular employment. It thus offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the working class's average normal level, and precisely this makes it the broad basis of capital's own special branches of exploitation. Maximum of working time and minimum of wages characterize it. We have already met its chief form under the heading of domestic industry. It recruits itself constantly from the supernumeraries of large-scale industry and agriculture, and especially from declining branches of industry where handicraft succumbs to manufacture and manufacture to machine industry. Its extent expands as the "making-redundant" advances with the extent and energy of accumulation. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally larger share in that class's overall growth than the other elements. Indeed, not only the mass of births and deaths, but the absolute size of families, stands in inverse proportion to the height of wages — that is, to the mass of means of subsistence the various categories of workers have at their disposal. This law of capitalist society would sound absurd among savages, or even among civilized colonists; it recalls the massive reproduction of individually weak and much-hunted animal species. Footnote 87 ↔ EN note [24]: "Poverty seems favourable to generation" (A. Smith); the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani finds this a specially wise arrangement of God, who "has ordained that men who exercise the most useful trades are born in overabundance"; S. Laing, having illustrated statistically that misery up to the extreme point of famine and pestilence tends to increase population's growth rather than check it, concludes: "if the people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be depopulated."

The deepest sediment of relative surplus population finally inhabits the sphere of pauperism. Apart from vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes — in short the actual lumpenproletariat — this stratum of society consists of three categories. First: those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that its mass swells with every crisis and shrinks with every revival of business. Second: orphans and pauper children. They are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and in times of great upswing, as in 1860 for example, are rapidly enrolled en masse into the active labour army. Third: the degenerate, the ragged, those unable to work — chiefly individuals perishing from the immobility caused by the division of labour, those who outlive a worker's normal age, and finally the victims of industry, whose numbers grow with dangerous machinery, mining, chemical factories, etc.: the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism forms the invalids' home of the active labour army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is enclosed within the production of relative surplus population, its necessity within that necessity; together with it, pauperism forms an existence-condition of capitalist production and the development of wealth. It belongs among the faux frais of capitalist production — which capital, however, largely knows how to roll off its own shoulders onto those of the working class and the petty middle class.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth — hence also the absolute size of the proletariat and the productive power of its labour — the greater the industrial reserve army. Disposable labour-power is developed by the same causes as capital's expansive power. The relative size of the industrial reserve army thus grows with the powers of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the more massive the consolidated surplus population, whose misery stands in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. Finally, the greater the Lazarus-layer of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater official pauperism. This is the absolute, general law of capitalist accumulation. Like every other law, it is modified in its realization by manifold circumstances whose analysis does not belong here.

One grasps the folly of the economic wisdom that preaches to workers that they should fit their numbers to capital's valorization needs. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly fits that number to those needs. The first word of this adjustment is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army; the last word is the misery of ever-growing strata of the active labour army, and the dead weight of pauperism.

The law whereby an ever-growing mass of means of production can, thanks to the progress in the productivity of social labour, be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power — this law expresses itself, on a capitalist basis, where it is not the worker who employs the means of labour but the means of labour that employ the worker, in this: that the higher the productive power of labour, the greater the pressure of workers upon their means of employment, and hence the more precarious their condition of existence — the sale of their own power to increase another's wealth, or for capital's own self-valorization. A faster growth of the means of production and of labour's productivity than of the productive population expresses itself, capitalistically, in the inverse form: that the working population always grows faster than capital's valorization need.

We saw in the fourth section, in analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system, all methods for raising the social productive power of labour are carried out at the individual worker's expense; all means for developing production turn into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producer; they mutilate the worker into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of the machine, destroy the content of his labour together with its torment, and estrange from him the intellectual potentials of the labour process to the very degree that science is incorporated into that process as an independent power; they deform the conditions within which he works, subject him during the labour process to the pettiest, most hateful despotism, transform his life-time into labour-time, and hurl his wife and child beneath capital's Juggernaut wheel. But all methods for producing surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and conversely every extension of accumulation becomes...

...a means for developing those methods. It follows, therefore, that in the same measure as capital accumulates, the worker's situation must worsen, whatever his payment, high or low. The law, finally, that always keeps relative surplus population, or the industrial reserve army, in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation, rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus riveted Prometheus to the rock. It conditions an accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole — that is, on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

This antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation has been expressed in various forms by political economists, although they partly lump together phenomena that are indeed analogous, but nevertheless essentially different, and belong to pre-capitalist modes of production. Footnote 88 ↔ EN note [25] quotes Marx's own words from The Poverty of Philosophy: "From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the relations of production in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a single, simple character, but a dual one; that in the very same relations in which wealth is produced, misery is produced also; that in the very same relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth — that is, the wealth of the bourgeois class — only by continually annihilating the wealth of individual members of that class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat."

The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the 18th century, grasps the antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural law of social wealth.

"Economic good and economic evil in a nation always keep the same balance (il bene ed il male economico in una nazione sempre all'istessa misura); the abundance of goods for some is always equal to the lack of them for others (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale alla mancanza di essi in altri). The great wealth of some is always accompanied by the absolute deprivation of necessities for many more others. The wealth of a nation corresponds to its population, and its misery corresponds to its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and the idle are a necessary fruit of the rich and the active," etc. Footnote 89 ↔ EN note [26]: G. Ortes, "Della Economia Nazionale libri sei 1774" (so the German carrier dates and titles it; the English apparatus instead reads "Delia... 1777" — both printed forms are preserved exactly as given, neither corrected against the other), in Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. XXI, pp. 6, 9, 22, 25, etc. Ortes himself writes there, p. 32 — given in the English apparatus in Italian — "In luoco di progettar sistemi inutili per la felicità de'popoli, mi limiterò a investigare la regione della loro infelicità" [Instead of projecting useless systems for the peoples' happiness, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their unhappiness].

In utterly crude fashion, about ten years after Ortes, the high-church Protestant parson Townsend glorified poverty as the necessary condition of wealth.

"Legal constraint to labour is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labour, calls forth the most powerful exertions."

Everything therefore comes down to making hunger permanent among the working class, and, according to Townsend, the population principle, especially active among the poor, sees to that.

"It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident" (improvident) — that is, so improvident as to be born into the world without a silver spoon in the mouth — "so that there always may be some" (that there always may be some) "to fulfil the most servile, the dirtiest, and the most ignoble functions of the community. The fund of human happiness" (the fund of human happiness) "is thereby greatly increased, while the more delicate" (the more delicate) "are freed from drudgery and can pursue higher callings undisturbed.... The poor-law has a tendency to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order, of that system which God and Nature have established in the world." Footnote 90 ↔ EN note [27]: "A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Wellwisher of Mankind" (the Rev. Mr. J. Townsend), 1786, republished Lond. 1817, pp. 15, 39, 41 — this "delicate" parson, from whose work Malthus often copies whole pages, borrowed the greater part of his doctrine from Sir J. Steuart, whom he nonetheless distorts: where Steuart writes that slavery once furnished a forcible method of making mankind industrious for the non-workers, so that men were once forced to work — that is, to work gratis for others — because they were the slaves of others, and are now forced to work — that is, to work gratis for non-workers — because they are the slaves of their own needs, Steuart does not conclude from this, as the fat prebendary does, that wage-labourers should forever go hungry; he wishes instead to increase their needs, and to make the growing number of those needs itself a further spur to their labour for "the more delicate."

If the Venetian monk found in the fatal decree that perpetuates misery the justification for Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries, and pious foundations, the Protestant prebendary conversely finds in it the pretext for condemning the laws by force of which the poor possessed a right to meagre public support.

"The progress of social wealth," says Storch, "begets that useful class of society... which carries out the most tedious, meanest, and most disgusting occupations, takes upon its shoulders, in a word, everything disagreeable and servile in life, and thereby procures for the other classes the time, the cheerfulness of mind, and the conventional" (c'est bon! <das ist gut!>) German prints Storch's quotation split across two paragraphs, breaking exactly at this c'est-bon interjection; the completion follows as DE p23. Moore–Aveling's English instead carries the whole quotation unbroken as a single paragraph, EN p20 — the section's preserved Storch split voice.

"...dignity of character, etc." This clause completes the Storch quotation begun at DE p22, which the German prints as a separate paragraph while the English keeps the whole quotation merged into the one continuous EN p20. Footnote 91 ↔ EN note [28]: Storch, l.c., t. III, p. 223.

Storch asks himself what, then, is really the advantage of this capitalist civilization, with its misery and its degradation of the masses, over barbarism? He finds only one answer — security!

"Thanks to the progress of industry and science," says Sismondi, "every worker can produce every day much more than he needs for his own consumption. But at the same time, while his labour produces wealth, that wealth, were he called upon to consume it himself, would make him ill-suited for labour." According to him, "men" (that is, non-workers) "would probably renounce all the perfections of the arts, as well as all the enjoyments that industry procures for us, were they obliged to purchase them through sustained labour like that of the worker.... Efforts today are separated from their reward; it is not the same person who first works and then rests: on the contrary, precisely because the one works, the other must rest.... The endless multiplication of the productive powers of labour can therefore have no other result than the increase of luxury and enjoyment for the idle rich." Footnote 92 ↔ EN note [29]: Sismondi, l.c., t. I, pp. 79, 80, 85.

Destutt de Tracy, finally, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, states it brutally:

"The poor nations are those where the people are well off, and the rich nations are those where the people are usually poor." Footnote 93 ↔ EN note [30]: Destutt de Tracy, l.c., p. 231, preserved in the original French: "Les nations pauvres, c'est là où le peuple est à son aise; et les nations riches, c'est là où il est ordinairement pauvre."

No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation as the last twenty years — as if this period had found Fortunatus' purse. Of all countries England again furnishes the classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world market, because capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and because the introduction of the Free-Trade millennium since 1846 has cut off vulgar economy's last retreat. The titanic advance of production — the latter half of the twenty years' period again far surpassing the former — was already sufficiently pointed out in Part Four.

Although the absolute increase of the English population in the last half century was very great, the relative increase or rate of growth fell constantly, as the following table borrowed from the census shows.

Annual percentage increase of the population of England and Wales, in decimal figures

1811-1821

1.533%

1821-1831

1.446%

1831-1841

1.326%

1841-1851

1.216%

1851-1861

1.141%

Consider now, on the other hand, the growth of wealth. The surest indicator here is the movement of profits, rents of land, and the like, subject to income tax. The increase of taxable profits (farmers and some other categories not included) amounted for Great Britain from 1853 to 1864 to 50.47%, or 4.58% as the annual average (footnote 94 ↔ EN note [31]: citing the Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H.M.'s Inland Revenue, Lond. 1866, p. 38), against a population increase over the same period of only about 12%. The increase of taxable rent of land — including houses, railways, mines, fisheries, and the like — amounted from 1853 to 1864 to 38%, or 3 5/12% annually, of which the following categories took the largest share:

Excess of the annual income of 1864 over that of 1853

Increase per year

Houses:

38.60%

3.50% per year

Quarries:

84.76%

7.70% per year

Mines:

68.85%

6.26% per year

Ironworks:

39.92%

3.63% per year

Fisheries:

57.37%

5.21% per year

Gasworks:

126.02%

11.45% per year

Railways:

83.29%

7.57% per year (footnote 95 ↔ EN note [32]: ibidem — citing the same Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H.M.'s Inland Revenue; the English printing attaches this note instead to the opening of the next paragraph, on the accelerating rate of income increase, rather than to this row).

If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive years each, the rate of augmentation of the income increases constantly. It is, e.g., for that arising from profits, 1.73% yearly for 1853-1857, 2.74% for 1857-1861, and 9.30% yearly for 1861-1864. The sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that came under the income tax was £307,068,898 in 1856; £328,127,416 in 1859; £351,745,241 in 1862; £359,142,897 in 1863; £362,462,279 in 1864; £385,530,020 in 1865 (footnote 96 ↔ EN note [33]: these figures are sufficient for comparison but, taken absolutely, are false, since perhaps £100,000,000 of income is annually undeclared; the Inland Revenue Commissioners' reports repeat complaints of systematic fraud, e.g. one joint-stock company returning £60,000 [£6,000 by the English printing] as assessable profits was reassessed at £88,000 and duty was ultimately paid on that sum, and another company returning £190,000 was compelled to admit that the true amount was £250,000).

The accumulation of capital was attended at the same time by its concentration and centralisation. Although no official statistics of agriculture existed for England (though they did for Ireland), they were voluntarily supplied by 10 counties. These showed that from 1851 to 1861 the number of farms under 100 acres fell from 31,583 to 26,567 (26,597 by the English printing), so that 5,016 had been merged into larger holdings (footnote 97 ↔ EN note [34]: citing the Census, and John Bright's assertion, never refuted, that 150 landlords own half of England, and 12 half the Scotch soil). From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than £1,000,000 came under the succession duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, 8 did; and from 1855 (1856 by the English printing) to June 1859, i.e. in 4½ years, 4 more did (footnote 98 ↔ EN note [35]: citing the Fourth Report of Inland Revenue, London 1860, p. 17). The centralisation will, however, be best seen from a short analysis of the Income Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, &c.) for the years 1864 and 1865. I note beforehand that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything down to £60 (given as "over £60" in the English phrasing). These taxable incomes in England, Wales, and Scotland amounted to £95,844,222 in 1864 and £105,435,787 in 1865 (105,435,579 by the English printing) (footnote 99 ↔ EN note [36]: these are the net incomes, after certain legally authorised abatements); the number of persons taxed was 308,416 in 1864, out of a total population of 23,891,009, and 332,431 in 1865, out of a total population of 24,127,003. The following table shows the distribution of these incomes in both years:

Year ending April 1864 / Year ending April 5th, 1865 (the latter date given in the English printing). Income from profit / Persons; Income from profit / Persons. Total income: £95,844,222 (printed 95.844.22 in the German edition) / 308,416; £105,435,787 (German printing) or £105,435,738 (English printing) / 332,431. Of these: £57,028,290 (German printing) or £57,028,289 (English printing) / 22,334 (German printing) or 23,334 (English printing); £64,554,297 / 24,075 (German printing) or 24,265 (English printing). Of these: £36,415,225 / 3,619; £42,535,576 / 4,021. Of these: £22,809,781 / 822 (German printing) or 832 (English printing); £27,555,313 / 973. Of these: £8,744,762 / 91; £11,077,238 / 107.

In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,453,079 tons of coal, of value £16,113,267 (16,113,167 by the English printing); in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855, 3,218,154 tons of pig-iron, of value £8,045,385; in 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value £11,919,877. In 1854 the length of the railways at work in the United Kingdom was 8,054 miles, with paid-up capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the length was 12,789 miles, with paid-up capital of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum of the exports and imports of the United Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865, £489,923,285. The following table shows the movement of the exports:

1847 (1846 by the English printing): £58,842,377. 1849: £63,596,052. 1856: £115,826,948. 1860: £135,842,817. 1865: £165,862,402. 1866: £188,917,563 (footnote 100 ↔ EN note [37], added in the 4th German edition, with Engels's own appended note: "At this moment, March 1867, the Indian and Chinese market is again overstocked by the consignments of the British cotton manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent took place among the cotton operatives; in 1867, in consequence of a similar operation, there was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston. — That was the prelude to the crisis which broke out immediately afterwards. — F. E.").

After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph of the Registrar-General of the British people:

"Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth." (footnote 101 ↔ EN note [38]: "Census, &c.," l.c., p. 11.)

Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of this wealth, to the working class.

"It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country," said Gladstone, "that while there was a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, and while there was an increase in the privations and distress of the labouring class and operatives, there was at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, and a constant increase of capital." (footnote 102 ↔ EN note [39]: sourced to Gladstone in the House of Commons, 13 February 1843, Times, 14 February 1843, Hansard 13 February; the original English there printed reads somewhat differently: "It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country that we see, beyond the possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and distress; there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an increase in the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment.")

Thus spoke this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of 13 February 1843. On 16 April 1863, twenty years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget:

"From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent ... In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased, taking 1853 as the basis, by 20 per cent. The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible ... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is entirely confined to classes of property, but ... it must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the articles of general consumption — while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have at any rate been growing less poor. That the extremes of poverty have diminished <4. Auflage: verändert> I do not venture to say." (footnote 103 ↔ EN note [40]: sourced to Gladstone in the House of Commons, 16 April 1863, Morning Star, 17 April, giving the same passage in its original English wording.)

What a lame anticlimax! If the working class has remained "poor," only "less poor" in proportion as it produced "an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power" for the propertied class, then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have. As to the cheapening of subsistence: official statistics, e.g. the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show a rise in price of 20% for the average of the three years 1860-1862 compared with 1851-1853. In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt, coal, and a mass of other necessary means of subsistence. (104) [raw and unattached in the German printing — no footnote body corresponds to this marker, and it is not restored, paired, or normalized here; the English printing instead attaches note [41] at this point, citing the official accounts in the Blue Book, "Miscellaneous Statistics of the United Kingdom," Part VI, London 1866, pp. 260-273 passim, and remarking that instead of orphan-asylum statistics one could equally cite the declamations of the ministerial press recommending dowries for the royal children, which never forget the greater dearness of the means of subsistence.] Gladstone's next Budget speech, of 7 April 1864, is a Pindaric dithyramb on the advance of surplus-value-making and the people's happiness "tempered by poverty." He speaks of masses "on the border" of pauperism, of branches of trade "in which wages have not risen," and finally sums up the happiness of the working class in the words:

"Human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence." (footnote 105 ↔ EN note [42]: sourced to Gladstone, House of Commons, 7 April 1864, in fuller context — "Think of those who are on the border of that region" [pauperism], "wages ... in others not increased ... human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence." The Hansard version instead runs: "Again, and yet more at large, what is human life but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for existence." An English writer characterised the continual, crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 by quoting Boileau <1.-4. Auflage: Molière>: "So ist der Mensch; er springt von einem zum anderen Ziele. Was er am Abend gepriesen, das hat er am Morgen verurteilt. Lästig dem anderen Menschen, vermag er kaum selbst seine Schwächen noch zu ertragen; er wechselt die Tracht, er wechselt das Urteil" — as cited in H. Roy, "The Theory of Exchanges, &c.," London 1864, p. 135.)

Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, states plainly:

"I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase of capital" (in the last ten years) "but this apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries of life are becoming continually dearer" (he believes, owing to the fall in value of the precious metals) "... the rich grow rapidly richer (die Reichen werden rasch reicher, "the rich grow rapidly richer," given in English within the German printing), while there is no perceptible advance in the comfort of the working classes ... The labourers become almost the slaves of the shopkeeper, to whom they are in debt." (footnote 106 ↔ EN note [43]: H. Fawcett, l.c., pp. 67, 82 [German printing] / pp. 67-82 [English printing]; as to the growing dependence of the workers on the shopkeeper, this is a consequence of the increasing fluctuations and interruptions of their employment.)

In the chapters on the working day and machinery, the circumstances were revealed under which the British working class created an "intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power" for the propertied classes. There, however, we were chiefly concerned with the worker during his social function. For a full elucidation of the laws of accumulation, his condition outside the workshop must also be looked at, his condition as to food and dwelling. The limits of this book compel us to concern ourselves chiefly with the worst-paid part of the industrial proletariat, and with the agricultural labourers, who together form the majority of the working class.

But first, one word on official pauperism, or on that part of the working class which has forfeited its condition of existence — the sale of labour-power — and vegetates on public alms. The official list of paupers numbered in England (footnote 107 ↔ EN note [44]: the German printing defines the geographic terms in full — "England" always includes Wales, "Great Britain" adds Scotland, and the "United Kingdom" adds Ireland to those three; the English printing states only that Wales is always included in England) 851,369 persons in 1855; 877,767 in 1856; 971,433 in 1865. In consequence of the cotton famine it swelled in the years 1863 and 1864 to 1,079,382 and 1,014,978. The crisis of 1866, which struck London hardest, created in this seat of the world market — more populous than the kingdom of Scotland — a pauper increase for 1866 of 19.5% compared with 1865, and of 24.4% compared with 1864, with a still greater increase for the first months of 1867 compared with 1866. From the analysis of pauper statistics two points are to be taken. On the one hand, the rise and fall of the pauper mass reflects the periodic vicissitudes of the industrial cycle. On the other, official statistics become more and more misleading as to the real extent of pauperism, in the degree to which, with the accumulation of capital, the class struggle — and therefore the workers' own self-consciousness — develops. E.g., the barbarity in the treatment of paupers over which the English Press ("Times," "Pall Mall Gazette," etc.) has cried out so loudly during the last two years is of ancient date: F. Engels recorded in 1844 exactly the same horrors and exactly the same transient, hypocritical outcry belonging to "sensational literature." But the frightful increase of "deaths by starvation" in London during the last ten years proves beyond doubt the workers' growing horror of the slavery of the workhouse (footnote 108 ↔ EN note [45]: it throws a peculiar light on the progress made since Adam Smith that he still occasionally used the word "workhouse" as synonymous with "manufactory," e.g. at the opening of his chapter on the division of labour: "those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse"), that penal institution of misery.

Let us turn now to the badly-paid strata of the industrial working class. During the cotton famine of 1862, Dr. Smith was charged by the Privy Council with an inquiry into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed operatives in Lancashire and Cheshire. His observations during many preceding years had led him to the conclusion that "to avert starvation diseases," the daily food of an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon with 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at least 4,300 grains of carbon with 200 grains of nitrogen; for women, about the same quantity of nutritive elements as are contained in 2 lbs. of good wheaten bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and women, at least 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His calculation was practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its agreement with the miserable quantity of nourishment to which want had forced down the consumption of the cotton operatives. This was, in December, 1862, 29,211 grains of carbon, and 1,295 grains of nitrogen weekly.

In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the state of distress of the worst-nourished part of the English working class. Dr. Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr. Smith. His inquiry ranges on the one hand over the agricultural labourers, on the other, over silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers, glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those comparatively in the best circumstances.

As a general result it was found that

"in only one of the examined classes of in-door operatives did the average nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e., sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was defect — in one, a very large defect — of both nitrogen and carbon. Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the average local diet." (footnote 109 ↔ EN note [46]: DE "Public Health. Sixth Report etc. for 1863", Lond. 1864, p. 13.; EN "Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864," p. 13.)

Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed. (footnote 110 ↔ EN note [47]: DE "l.c.p. 17."; EN "l. c., p. 17.") The insufficiency of food among the agricultural labourers, fell, as a rule, chiefly on the women and children, for "the man must eat to do his work." Still greater penury ravaged the town-workers examined. They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of severe and injurious privation. (EN note [48]: "l. c., p. 13.") ("Privation" of the capitalist all this! i.e., "abstinence" from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of his "hands.") (footnote 111 ↔ EN note [49]: the German sentence closes here with note (111), reading "l.c.p. 3."; the English printing's note [49] at this same close instead reads "l. c., Appendix, p. 232." — wording identical to the German edition's separate table-note (112), which German attaches only at the close of the nutrition table at p7, not here. Both the page-number disagreement between (111) and [48], and this note-boundary shift between (111) and [49], are preserved exactly as printed, without reconciliation.)

The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named categories of purely town-dwelling work-people, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr. Smith, and with the food-allowance of the cotton operatives during the time of their greatest distress:

Both Sexes. Average weekly carbon (Gran/grains). Average weekly nitrogen (Gran/grains). — Fünf städtische Geschäftszweige / Five in-door occupations: 28.876 Gran Kohlenstoff / 28,876 grains carbon; 1.192 Gran Stickstoff / 1,192 grains nitrogen. — Arbeitslose Lancashire Fabrikarbeiter / Unemployed Lancashire Operatives: 29.211 Gran Kohlenstoff in the German printing, 1.295 Gran Stickstoff; the English table instead prints 28,211 grains of carbon, 1,295 grains of nitrogen — DE 29.211 and EN-table 28,211 are both retained here exactly as printed, without reconciliation (EN p1 separately gives 29,211 for this same December 1862 famine ration, agreeing with DE against the English table's own 28,211). — Minimalquantum, vorgeschlagen für die Lancashire Arbeiter auf gleiche Zahl männlicher und weiblicher / Minimum quantity to be allowed to the Lancashire Operatives, equal number of males and females: 28.600 Gran Kohlenstoff / 28,600 grains carbon; 1.330 Gran Stickstoff / 1,330 grains nitrogen. (footnote 112, DE only, attached at the table's close: "l.c., Appendix, p. 232." — the identical citation appears in the English printing not at the table but earlier, attached instead to EN note [49] at the close of the preceding "abstinence" parenthetical [see p5]; the note itself, not merely its wording, is positioned differently between the two printings, and this is preserved as printed rather than normalized.)

One half, or 60/125, of the industrial labour categories investigated, had absolutely no beer, 28% no milk. The weekly average of the liquid means of nourishment in the families varied from seven ounces in the needle-women to 24¾ ounces in the stocking-makers. The majority of those who did not obtain milk were needle-women in London. The quantity of bread-stuffs consumed weekly varied from 7¾ lbs. for the needle-women to 11½ lbs. for the shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9 lbs. per adult weekly. Sugar (treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for the kid-glovers to 11 ounces for the stocking-makers; and the total average per week for all categories was 8 ounces per adult weekly. Total weekly average of butter (fat, etc.) 5 ounces per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7¼ ounces for the silk-weavers, to 18¼ ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the different categories 13.6 ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult, gave the following average figures; silk-weavers 2s. 2½d., needle-women 2s. 7d., kid-glovers 2s. 9½d., shoemakers 2s 7¾d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6¼d. For the silk-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only 1s. 8½d. The worst categories were the needle-women, silk-weavers and kid-glovers. (footnote 113 ↔ EN note [50]: DE "l.c.p. 232, 233."; EN "l. c., pp. 232, 233.")

Of these facts, Dr. Simon in his General Health Report says:

"That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator of disease, can be affirmed by any one who is conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point of view, there is, in my opinion, a very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than food — against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate protection — dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture there will have been scarcely any — even cleanliness will have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious moment.... These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the in-door operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting.... And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism." (footnote 114 ↔ EN note [51]: DE "l.c.p. 14, 15."; EN "l. c., pp. 14, 15.")

The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the "housing of the poor." Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the labourers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the dwellings of the working-people. "Improvements" of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks, warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places. On the other hand, every one knows that the dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to their excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and therefore of the capitalistic relations of property generally (footnote 115 ↔ EN note [52]: S. Laing — "In no particular have the rights of persons been so avowedly and shamefully sacrificed to the rights of property as in regard to the lodging of the labouring class. Every large town may be looked upon as a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands pass yearly through the fire as offerings to the moloch of avarice," l. c., p. 150; DE gives the same attribution as "S. Laing, l.c.p. 150."), is here so evident, that even the official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on "property and its rights." With the development of industry, with the accumulation of capital, with the growth and "improvement" of towns, the evil makes such progress that the mere fear of contagious diseases which do not spare even "respectability," brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in some towns, as Liverpool, Glasgow, &c., took strenuous measures through their municipalities. Nevertheless Dr. Simon, in his report of 1865, says: "Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in England." By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the conditions of the housing of the agricultural labourers, in 1865 of the poorer classes in the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr. Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on "Public Health." To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later. On the condition of town dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a general remark of Dr. Simon.

"Although my official point of view," he says, "is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored .... In its higher degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilisation which has its essence in physical and moral cleanliness." (footnote 116 ↔ EN note [53]: DE "Public Health. Eighth Report", Lond. 1866, p. 14, Note.; EN "Public Health, Eighth Report. 1866." p. 14, note.)

London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human beings.

"He feels clear," says Dr. Hunter, "on two points; first, that there are about 20 large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition exceeds almost anything he has seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case 20 years ago." (footnote 117 ↔ EN note [54]: DE "l.c.p. 89." plus, on the children in these colonies, Dr. Hunter: "Wir wissen nicht, wie Kinder vor diesem Zeitalter dichter Agglomeration der Armen aufgebracht worden, und er wäre ein kühner Prophet, der vorhersagen wollte, welches Betragen zu erwarten von Kindern, die unter Zuständen ohne Parallele in diesem Land jetzt ihre Erziehung für künftige Praxis als gefährliche Klassen durchmachen, indem sie die halbe Nacht aufsitzen mit Personen jeden Alters, trunken, obszön und zanksüchtig." (l.c.p. 56.); EN "l. c., p. 89." plus the parallel English wording: "People are not now alive to tell us how children were brought up before this age of dense agglomerations of poor began, and he would be a rash prophet who should tell us what future behaviour is to be expected from the present growth of children, who, under circumstances probably never before paralleled in this country, are now completing their education for future practice, as 'dangerous classes' by sitting up half the night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and quarrelsome." (l. c., p. 56.)) "It is not too much to say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal." (footnote 118 ↔ EN note [55]: DE "l.c.p. 62."; EN "l. c., p. 62.")

Further, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small shopkeepers and other elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more and more under the curse of these vile conditions of dwelling, in proportion as "improvements," and with them the demolition of old

streets and houses advance, as factories and the afflux of human beings grow in the metropolis, and finally as house rents rise with the ground-rents.

"Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more than one room." (footnote 119 ↔ EN note [56]: DE "Report of the Officer of Health of St. Martin's in the Fields, 1865."; EN "Report of the Officer of Health of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865.")

There is almost no house-property in London that is not overburdened with a number of middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in comparison with its yearly revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of it again at a jury price (the expropriation valuation fixed by jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value arising from the neighbourhood of some large establishment. As a consequence of this there is a regular trade in the purchase of "fag-ends of leases."

"Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to do as they do — get all they can from the tenants while they have them, and leave as little as they can for their successors." (footnote 120 ↔ EN note [57]: DE "Public Health. Eighth Report", Lond. 1866, p. 91.; EN "Public Health, Eighth Report, 1866," p. 91.)

The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In consequence of the making of railroads in the City,

"the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London of a number of families wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty worldly goods on their backs, without any resting place but the workhouse." (footnote 121 ↔ EN note [58]: DE "l.c.p. 88."; EN "l. c., p. 88.")

The workhouses are already over-crowded, and the "improvements" already sanctioned by Parliament are only just begun. If labourers are driven away by the demolition of their old houses, they do not leave their old parish, or at most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can get to it.

"They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to their workshops. The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish, parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those.... Even at an advanced rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to get an accommodation so good as the meagre one they have left.... Half the workmen ... of the Strand ... walked two miles to their work." (EN note [59]: "l. c., p. 88."; the German printing carries no footnote marker for this quotation — an asymmetry preserved as printed, not reconciled.)

This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the wealth of London, may serve as an example of the London

packing together of human beings in that town. In one of its parishes, the Officer of Health reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood that every sanitary measure, which, as has been the case hitherto in London, hunts the labourers from one quarter, by demolishing uninhabitable houses, serves only to crowd them together yet more closely in another.

"Either," says Dr. Hunter, "the whole proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public compassion (!) be effectually aroused to the obligation which may now be without exaggeration called national, of supplying cover to those who by reason of their having no capital, cannot provide it for themselves, though they can by periodical payments reward those who will provide it for them." (footnote 122 ↔ EN note [60]: DE "l.c.p. 89."; EN "l. c., p. 89.")

Admire this capitalistic justice! (kapitalistische Justiz) The owner of land, of houses, the businessman, when expropriated by "improvements" such as railroads, the building of new streets, &c., not only receives full indemnity. He must, according to law, human and divine, be comforted for his enforced "abstinence" over and above this by a thumping profit. The labourer, with his wife and child and chattels, is thrown out into the street, and — if he crowds in too large numbers towards quarters of the town where the vestries insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of sanitation!

Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century no single town in England of 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are 28 towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants.

"The result of this change is not only that the class of town people is enormously increased, but the old close-packed little towns are now centres, built round on every side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable to the rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The successors of these rich are occupying the larger houses at the rate of a family to each room [... and find accommodation for two or three lodgers ...] and a population, for which the houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children." (footnote 123 ↔ EN note [61]: DE "l.c.p. 56."; EN "l. c., p. 55 and 56." — the page citation itself diverges between the two printings and is preserved as printed, not reconciled; the surrounding phrasing on lodgers also diverges between the printings, per the bracketed English clause above, and is likewise preserved rather than harmonized with the German's "eine Familie, oft noch mit Untermietern, für jedes Zimmer.")

The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the improvised dwellings of the labourers.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district of growing productiveness (DE "Kohlen- und Bergbaudistrikts", a coal and mining district — the named industry diverges between the two printings and is preserved as printed, not reconciled), takes the next place after London in the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons live there in single rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community, houses in great numbers have lately been destroyed by the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was, therefore, in 1865, more full than ever. Scarcely a room was to let. Dr. Embleton, of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says:

"There can be little doubt that the great cause of the continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding of human beings, and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any civilised community; in them men, women, and children lie at night huddled together: and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and the day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time together, the beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water and worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous." (footnote 124 ↔ EN note [62]: DE "l.c.p. 149."; EN "l. c., p. 149." — the German quotation is itself printed without a closing quotation mark before the note number, an asymmetry preserved as printed rather than corrected.)

The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s.

"The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne," says Dr. Hunter, "contains a sample of the finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by external circumstances of house and street into an almost savage degradation." (footnote 125 ↔ EN note [63]: DE "l.c.p. 50."; EN "l. c., p. 50.")

As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the state of the dwellings of an industrial town may today be bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or the aedileship of the town may have pulled itself together for the removal of the most shocking abuses. Tomorrow, like a swarm of locusts, come crowding in masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the hitherto respectable labourer's dwelling is transformed into a lodging house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets in the 30 years' war. Example: Bradford (Yorkshire). There the municipal philistine was just busied with urban improvements. Besides, there were still in Bradford, in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited houses. But now comes that revival of trade which the mildly liberal Mr. Forster, the negro's friend, recently crowed over with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an overflow from the waves of the ever fluctuating

"reserve army" or "relative surplus population." The frightful cellar habitations and rooms registered in the list (footnote 126 ↔ EN note [64]: DE "Liste des Agenten einer Arbeiter-Assekuranzgesellschaft zu Bradford Vulcanstreet. Nr. 122 1 Zimmer 16 Personen Lumleystreet. Nr. 13 1 Zimmer 11 Personen Bowerstreet. Nr. 41 1 Zimmer 11 Personen Portlandstreet. Nr. 112 1 Zimmer 10 Personen Hardystreet. Nr. 17 1 Zimmer 10 Personen Northstreet. Nr. 18 1 Zimmer 16 Personen ditto Nr. 17 1 Zimmer 13 Personen Wymerstreet. Nr. 19 1 Zimmer 8 Erwachsne Jowettstreet. Nr. 56 1 Zimmer 12 Personen Georgestreet. Nr. 150 1 Zimmer 3 Familien Rifle Court, Marygate. Nr. 11 1 Zimmer 11 Personen Marshallstreet. Nr. 28 1 Zimmer 10 Personen ditto Nr. 49 3 Zimmer 3 Familien Georgestreet. Nr. 128 1 Zimmer 18 Personen ditto Nr. 130 1 Zimmer 16 Personen Edwardstreet. Nr. 4 1 Zimmer 17 Personen [Georgestreet. Nr. 49 1 Zimmer 2 Familien] Yorkstreet. Nr. 34 1 Zimmer 2 Familien Salt Piestreet 2 Zimmer 26 Personen Keller Regent Square 1 1 Keller 8 Personen Acrestreet 1 Keller 7 Personen Robert's Court. Nr. 33 1 Keller 7 Personen Back Prattstreet. vernutzt als Kupferschmiedewerkstatt 1 Keller 7 Personen Ebenezerstreet. Nr. 27 1 Keller 6 Personen (l.c.p. 111.)"; EN "COLLECTING AGENTS LIST (BRADFORD). Houses Vulcan Street, No. 122 1 room 16 persons Lumiev Street, No. 13 1 room 11 persons Bower Street, No. 41 1 room 11 persons Portland Street. No. 112 1 room 10 persons Hardy Street, No. 17 1 room 10 persons North Street, No. 18 1 room 16 persons North Street, No. 17 1 room 13 persons Wymer Street, No. 19 1 room 8 adults Jowett Street, No. 56 1 room 12 persons George Street, No. 150 1 room 3 families Rifle Court Marygate, No. 11 1 room 11 persons Marshall Street, No. 28 1 room 10 persons Marshall Street, No. 49 1 room 3 families George Street, No. 128 1 room 18 persons George Street, No. 130 1 room 16 persons Edward Street, No. 4 1 room 17 persons George Street, No. 49 1 room 2 families York Street, No. 34 1 room 2 families Salt Pie Street (bottom) 2 room 26 persons Cellars Regent Square 1 cellar 8 persons Acre Street 1 cellar 7 persons 33 Roberts Court 1 cellar 7 persons Back Pratt Street used as a brazier's shop 1 cellar 7 persons 27 Ebenezer Street 1 cellar 6 persons l. c., p. 111. (no male above 18)." — the two lists diverge in spelling at several entries, e.g. DE "Lumleystreet" against EN "Lumiev Street", preserved as printed) which Dr. Hunter obtained from the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most part inhabited by well-paid labourers. They declared that they would willingly pay for better dwellings if they were to be had. Meanwhile, they become degraded, they fall ill, one and all, whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M. P., sheds tears over the blessings of Free Trade, and the profits of the eminent men of Bradford who deal in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865, Dr. Bell, one of the poor law doctors of Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality of fever-patients in his district to the nature of their dwellings.

"In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet ... there are ten persons .... Vincent Street, Green Aire Place (DE "Green Air Place" — the spelling diverges between printings, preserved as printed), and the Leys include 223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants, 435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds — and in that term I include any roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings — have an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5 and 6 persons to each (DE "manches 4 und 6 Personen" — the figure itself diverges between the two printings, 4 against 5, preserved as printed and not reconciled), and some people, I am told, are absolutely without beds; they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards — young men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for human habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are distributed amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to fester in our midst." (footnote 127 ↔ EN note [65]: DE "l.c.p. 114."; EN "l. c., p. 114.")

Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its dwellings.

"Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe." (footnote 128 ↔ EN note [66]: DE "l.c.p. 50."; EN "l. c., p. 50." — the German quotation itself opens with "Hier" ["Here"] rather than naming Bristol, where the English quotation names "Bristol" outright; this asymmetry is preserved as printed, not reconciled.)

We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose occupation is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they are not on the march, they "camp." Nomad labour is used for various operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it carries into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp, small-pox, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, &c. (footnote 129 ↔ EN note [67]: DE "Public Health. Seventh Report", Lond. 1865, p. 18.; EN "Public Health. Seventh Report. 1865," p. 18.) In undertakings that involve much capital outlay, such as railways, &c., the contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and the like, thus improvising villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local boards, very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the labourers in two-fold fashion — as soldiers of industry and as tenants. According as the wooden hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its inhabitant, navvy, or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4 shillings weekly in the English printing, against 2, 3, 4 shillings in the German — both retained here exactly as printed, without reconciliation (footnote 130 ↔ EN note [68]: DE "l.c.p. 165."; EN "l. c., p. 165."). One example will suffice. In September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir George Grey, Home Secretary:

"Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve months ago" — the German printing instead has small-pox "wholly unknown" (ganz unbekannt) in the parish before that time; both readings are retained here exactly as printed, without reconciliation. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway from Lewisham to Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the principal works being in the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was also established the depôt for the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were built in several places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr. Jay, for their especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and, besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be, although there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were, according to the medical report we received, that in the night-time these poor people were compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay promised to appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from contagious diseases, might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the 23rd July last — the German printing instead has "the end of last July" (Ende letzten Julis); both dates are retained here exactly as printed, without reconciliation — but although since the date of the last promise there have been several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease, yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9th September instant, Mr. Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most disgraceful. I should add, for your (the Home Secretary's) information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house, which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious diseases, has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox and fever; that from the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of five months, there have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them being in the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of persons who have suffered from that disease although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families keeping it as private as possible." (footnote 131 ↔ EN note [69]: DE "l.c.p. 18, Note. Der Armenpfleger der Chapel-en-le-Frith-Union berichtet an den Registrar General: Zu Doveholes hat man eine Anzahl kleiner Aushöhlungen in einem großen Hügel von Kalkasche gemacht. Diese Höhlen dienen den Erd- und andren am Eisenbahnbau beschäftigten Arbeitern zur Wohnung. Die Höhlen sind eng, feucht, ohne Abzug für Unreinigkeiten und ohne Abtritte. Sie entbehren aller Ventilationsmittel, mit Ausnahme eines Lochs durch die Wölbung, das zugleich als Schornstein dient. Die Pocken wüten und haben schon verschiedne Todesfälle" (unter den Troglodyten) "verursacht."; EN "l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving Officer of the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registar-General as follows: — 'At Doveholes, a number of small excavations have been made into a large hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of lime-kilns), and which are used as dwellings, and occupied by labourers and others employed in the construction of a railway now in course of construction through that neighbourhood. The excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies about them, and not the slightest means of ventilation except up a hole pulled through the top, and used for a chimney. In consequence of this defect, small-pox has been raging for some time, and some deaths [amongst the troglodytes] have been caused by it.'")

The labourers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid categories of the British proletariat. The price at which they buy their wages was shown on an earlier page (footnote 132 ↔ EN note [70]: DE "Die auf S. 460 ff. gegebnen Einzelheiten beziehn sich namentlich auf Arbeiter in Kohlenbergwerken. Über den noch schlechteren Zustand in den Metallminen vgl. den gewissenhaften Bericht der Royal Commission von 1864."; EN "The details given at the end of Part IV. refer especially to the labourers in coal mines. On the still worse condition in metal mines, see the very conscientious Report of the Royal Commission of 1864."). Here I merely cast a hurried glance over the conditions of their dwellings. As a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether its owner or his tenant, builds a number of cottages for his hands. They receive cottages and coal for firing "for nothing" — i.e., these form part of their wages, paid in kind. Those who are not lodged in this way receive in compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts attract with rapidity a large population, made up of the miners themselves, and the artisans, shopkeepers, &c., that group themselves around them. The ground-rents are high, as they are generally where population is dense. The master tries, therefore, to run up, within the smallest space possible at the mouth of the pit, just so many cottages as are necessary to pack together his hands and their families. If new mines are opened in the neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only one point of view is of moment, the "abstinence" of the capitalist from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable.

"The lodging which is obtained by the pitman and other labourers connected with the collieries of Northumberland and Durham," says Dr. Julian Hunter, "is perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the dearest of which any large specimens can be found in England, the similar parishes of Monmouthshire excepted.... The extreme badness is in the high number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the ground-plot on which a great number of houses are thrust, the want of water, the absence of privies, and the frequent placing of one house on the top of another, or distribution into flats, ... the lessee acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not resident." (footnote 133 ↔ EN note [71]: DE "l.c.p. 180, 182."; EN "l. c., pp. 180, 182.") The German printing continues directly into Dr. Stevens's report at this same paragraph, breaking off mid-sentence at "Pächter" ("... All colliers are bound to the [lessee]"); the English printing instead closes Hunter's quotation here and places the whole of Stevens's report in the following paragraph — a verified cross-printing paragraphing seam, preserved as printed, not an omission.

"In pursuance of my instructions," says Dr. Stevens, "I visited most of the large colliery villages in the Durham Union.... With very few exceptions, the general statement that no means are taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be true of all of them.... All colliers are bound ['bound,' an expression which, like bondage, dates from the age of serfdom] to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months.... If the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the 'viewer,' a mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at the annual 'binding,' such men are turned off... It appears to me that no part of the 'truck system' could be worse than what obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is bound to take as part of his hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences; he cannot help himself, and it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him except his proprietor (he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably certain. The collier is also often supplied with water by the proprietor, which, whether it be good or bad, he has to pay for, or rather he suffers a deduction for from his wages." (footnote 134 ↔ EN note [72]: DE "l.c.p. 515, 517."; EN "l. c., pp. 515, 517.") The German printing opens this paragraph with "(lessee) oder Eigentümer des Bergwerks für 12 Monate gebunden" ("bound," Ausdruck, der wie bondage <Hörigkeit> aus der Zeit der Leibeigenschaft stammt), continuing Stevens's report from the German p4's "Pächter" — the same verified paragraphing seam noted at p4, not an omission.

In conflict with "public opinion," or even with the Officers of Health, capital makes no difficulty about "justifying" the conditions partly dangerous, partly degrading, to which it confines the working and domestic life of the labourer, on the ground that they are necessary for profit. It is the same thing when capital "abstains" from protective measures against dangerous machinery in the factory, from appliances for ventilation and for safety in mines, &c. It is the same here with the housing of the miners.

Dr. Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, in his official Report says: "In apology for the wretched household accommodation ... it is alleged that miners are commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee's interest (which in collieries is commonly for 21 years), is not so long that he should deem it worth his while to create good accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople and others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to act liberally in the matter, this disposition would commonly be defeated by his landlord's tendency to fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege of having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable village which the labourers of the subterranean property ought to inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes others who might desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report to enter upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it even needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were provided, the cost ... would eventually fall — whether on landlord, or lessee, or labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are vouched for in the annexed reports [those of Dr. Hunter, Dr. Stevens, &c.] a remedy may well be claimed.... Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do great public wrong. The landlord in his capacity of mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate, and then in his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the labourers whom he collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. The lessee [the capitalist exploiter] meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for resisting that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be exorbitant, the consequences fall, not on him, that his labourers on whom they fall have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that neither obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable inducements towards a 'strike.'" (footnote 135 ↔ EN note [73]: DE "l.c.p. 16."; EN "l. c., p. 16.")

Before I turn to the actual agricultural labourers, let me show by one example how crises themselves affect even the best-paid section of the working class, its aristocracy. It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the great crises with which the industrial cycle periodically closes; the next fell due in 1866. Already discounted in the proper factory districts by the cotton famine, which drove much capital out of its accustomed sphere of investment into the great centres of the money market, the crisis this time took on a predominantly financial character. Its outbreak in May 1866 (EN gives only "in 1866," without the month) was signalled by the collapse of a gigantic London bank, followed hard on its heels by the crash of countless swindling finance companies. One of the great London branches of business struck by the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only over-produced beyond all measure during the time of swindling, but had, besides, taken on enormous delivery contracts, speculating that the source of credit would keep flowing just as abundantly. Now a terrible reaction set in, which continues also in other London industries (footnote 136, attached here in the German printing — mid-clause, directly after "industries" — rather than at the sentence's close, where EN attaches its own numbered note [74]: "Wholesale starvation of the London Poor! ... Within the last few days the walls of London have been placarded with large posters bearing the remarkable announcement: 'Fat oxen, starving men! The fat oxen have left their palaces of glass to feast the rich in their luxurious chambers, while the starving men rot and die in their wretched dens.' The placards bearing this ominous inscription are constantly renewed: no sooner is one batch defaced and pasted over than a fresh batch reappears in the same, or an equally public, place ... This recalls the omens that prepared the French people for the events of 1789 ... At this moment, while English workmen with wife and child are dying of cold and hunger, millions of English money — the product of English labour — are being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign loans." — Reynolds' Newspaper, 20 January 1867) up to

— this hour, the end of March 1867 (EN instead places this same date earlier in the sentence, as "even at this hour (the end of March, 1867)," ahead of "continues," rather than trailing it here as its own clause) — continues. To characterize the condition of the workers, here follows a passage from the detailed report of a correspondent of the "Morning Star," who at the beginning of 1867 visited the chief centres of suffering (EN: "who, at the end of 1866, and beginning of 1867, visited the chief centres of distress").

"In the East of London, in the districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse, and Canning Town, there are at least 15,000 workers together with their families in a state of extreme want, among them over 3,000 skilled mechanics (EN prints "3,000," without "over," and folds the figure into a different clause describing men breaking stones in the workhouse yard after distress of over half a year's duration). Their reserve funds are exhausted as a result of six or eight months of unemployment ... I had great difficulty reaching the gate of the workhouse (of Poplar), for it was besieged by a starving crowd. It was waiting for bread tickets, but the time for distribution had not yet come. The yard formed a large square with a lean-to roof running around its walls. Thick heaps of snow covered the paving stones in the middle of the yard. Here certain small spaces were fenced off with wicker-work, like sheep pens, in which the men work in better weather. On the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up that no one could sit in them. The men were, however, occupied under the shelter of the roof-overhangs with macadamizing paving stones. Each had a thick paving stone for a seat and beat with a heavy hammer on the frost-covered granite until he had broken off five bushels of it. Then his day's work was done, and he received 3 d." (2 silver groschen, 6 pfennigs) "and a ticket for bread (EN instead reads: "got his day's pay — threepence and an allowance of food," naming no bread ticket). In another part of the yard stood a rickety little wooden house. On opening the door we found it filled with men, crowded shoulder to shoulder to keep one another warm. They were picking oakum and disputing among themselves as to which of them could work longest on a minimum of food, for endurance was the point of honour. In this one workhouse alone 7,000 were receiving relief, among them many hundreds who six or eight months before had earned the highest wages paid to skilled labour in this country. Their number would have been twice as great had there not been so many who, having exhausted all their money reserves, still shrink from taking refuge with the parish so long as they have anything left to pawn ... Leaving the workhouse, I took a walk through the streets of mostly one-storey houses so numerous in Poplar. My guide was a member of the Committee for the Unemployed. The first house we entered was that of an iron-worker, out of work for 27 weeks. I found the man with his whole family sitting in a back room. The room was not yet quite stripped of furniture, and there was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the bare feet of the young children from the frost, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a plate opposite the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were picking in payment for the workhouse bread. The man worked in one of the yards described above for a bread ticket and 3 d. a day. He had now come home for dinner, very hungry, as he told us with a bitter smile, and his dinner consisted of a few slices of bread and dripping and a cup of milkless tea ... The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman who, without saying a word, led us into a small back room, where her whole family sat, silent, their eyes fixed on a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness hung about these people and their little room that I do not wish ever to see a similar scene again. 'They have earned nothing, sir,' said the woman, pointing to her boys, 'nothing for 26 weeks, and all our money is gone, all the money that I and the father put by in better times, in the delusion that it would secure us a support during bad business. See here,' she cried, almost wildly, bringing out a bank-book with all its regular entries of money paid in and money withdrawn, so that we could see how the little fortune had begun with the first deposit of 5 shillings, how it had grown little by little to £20, and then melted away again, from pounds to shillings, until the last entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet of paper. This family received a scanty meal daily from the workhouse ... Our next visit was to the wife of an Irishman who had worked in the shipyards. We found her ill from want of food, stretched on a mattress in her clothes, barely covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding was in the pawnshop. The wretched children tended her, and looked as if they themselves needed a mother's care in return. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them this low, and as she told the story of the bitter past, she moaned as though all hope of a better future were lost ... On leaving the house a young man ran up to us and begged us to come into his house and see whether anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children, a cluster of pawn tickets, and a quite bare room were all he had to show."

On the after-effects of the crisis of 1866, here follows an extract from a Tory newspaper. It must not be forgotten that the East End of London, with which we are concerned here, is not only the seat of the iron shipbuilders mentioned in the text of the chapter (EN: "mentioned above"), but also of a so-called "home industry" always paid below the minimum (EN: "always underpaid").

"A frightful spectacle unfolded yesterday in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East End did not parade en masse with black mourning flags, the stream of people was imposing enough. Let us remember what this population suffers: it is dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them ... In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, close beside the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world has ever seen, close beside it 40,000 helplessly starving! These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; they, at all times half-starved, cry their misery into our ears, they cry it to heaven, they tell us of their wretchedly battered dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless to beg. The local

— ratepayers themselves are, through the demands of the parishes, driven to the very verge of pauperism." ("Standard," 5 April 1867.)

Since it is fashionable among English capitalists to depict Belgium as the labourer's paradise, because "the freedom of labour," or, what is the same thing, "the freedom of capital," is there stunted neither by the despotism of Trades' Unions nor by Factory Acts, here are a few words on the "happiness" of the Belgian labourer. Certainly no one was more deeply initiated into the mysteries of this happiness than the late Monsieur Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of the Belgian prisons and charitable institutions and member of the central commission for Belgian statistics. Let us take his work: "Budgets éonomiques des classes ouvrières en Belgique," Bruxelles, 1855 (EN prints the title as "Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique" — "économiques" accented and "de la Belgique" rather than "en Belgique"; neither wording is corrected here). Here we find, among other things, a normal Belgian worker's family, whose yearly expenditure and income are calculated from very exact data, and whose nourishment is then compared with that of the soldier, the sailor, and the prisoner. The family "consists of father, mother, and four children." Of these six persons, "four can be usefully employed the whole year through"; it is assumed "that there is neither sick person nor one incapable of work among them," nor "expenditure for religious, moral, and intellectual purposes, except a very small sum for church seats," nor "contributions to savings banks or old-age funds," nor "expenditure on luxuries or anything superfluous." Yet the father and the eldest son are allowed to smoke tobacco and visit the tavern on Sundays, for which a whole 86 centimes a week are set aside.

"From the general compilation of the wages allowed to workers in the various trades, it follows ... that the highest average daily wage is: 1 fr. 56 c. for men, 89 c. for women, 56 c. for boys, and 55 c. for girls. Calculated on this basis, the family's income would amount, at the very most, to 1,068 fr. a year ... In the household taken as typical we have added together every possible source of income. But if we credit the mother with a wage, we thereby deprive the household of its management: who looks after the house, who after the small children? Who is to cook, wash, mend? This dilemma confronts the workers every day."

According to this, the budget of the family is as follows:

the father

300 working-days at fr. 1.56, fr. 468 — the mother, fr. 0.89, fr. 267 — the boy, fr. 0.56, fr. 169 (EN prints fr. 168, one franc lower; neither figure is corrected here) — the girl, fr. 0.55, fr. 165. (DE compresses these four rows into this single dense line, with the father's bare label given separately in the preceding paragraph; EN instead expands each of the four workers into its own complete row — "The father 300 working-days at fr. 1.56 fr. 468," "mother 300 working-days at fr. 0.89 fr. 267," "boy 300 working-days at fr. 0.56 fr. 168," "girl 300 working-days at fr. 0.55 fr. 165" — repeating "300 working-days at" for each; the table reflow is preserved rather than normalized.)

Total, fr. 1,068.

The annual expenditure of the family and its deficit would amount, were the worker to have the food (EN phrases this heading more loosely, as "The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the hypothesis that the labourer has the food of") of:

of the sailor of the fleet, fr. 1,828. (DE gives only this cost row here; its deficit — "760,-" — is fragmented onto DE p15-p16, whereas EN compacts cost and deficit into a single row at this same locus: "The man-of-war's man fr. 1,828 Deficit fr. 760.")

Deficit fr. (DE prints the bare label alone on its own row, with the value "760,-" following only on DE p16; EN carries no separate row here, having already compacted the whole "Deficit fr. 760" into EN p14.)

760 — of the soldier, fr. 1,473. (DE fuses the trailing deficit value from the sailor row with the soldier's own food-cost row into this single line; EN instead gives the soldier his own compacted row: "The soldier fr. 1,473 Deficit fr. 405.")

Deficit fr. (again the bare label alone, with the soldier's deficit value "405,-" following only on DE p18; EN has already compacted "Deficit fr. 405" into its soldier row.)

405 — of the prisoner, fr. 1,112. (DE again fuses the trailing deficit value from the soldier row with the prisoner's own food-cost row; EN gives the prisoner his own compacted row: "The prisoner fr. 1,112 Deficit fr. 44.")

Deficit fr. (the bare label once more, with the prisoner's deficit value "44,-" following only on DE p20; EN has already compacted "Deficit fr. 44" into its prisoner row.)

44. (DE closes the fragmented deficit table with this bare value on its own row; EN carries no separate row here, the figure already folded into its compacted prisoner row.)

"One sees that few working-class families can procure for themselves the food, not of the sailor or the soldier, but even of the prisoner. On average, each prisoner cost Belgium 63 c. daily in 1847-1849, which gives a difference of 13 c. against the daily maintenance cost of the worker. The costs of administration and supervision, on the other hand, are offset by the fact that the prisoner pays no rent (EN adds material absent from the compact German wording here: "that the purchases they make at the canteens are not included in the expenses of maintenance, and that these expenses are greatly lowered in consequence of the large number of persons that make up the establishments, and of contracting for or buying wholesale, the food and other things that enter into their consumption") ... But how does it happen that a great number, we might say the great majority, of workers live in still more frugal circumstances? Only by taking refuge in expedients of which the worker alone holds the secret: by cutting down on the daily ration; eating rye bread instead of wheat; eating less meat or none at all; likewise with butter and spices; by packing the family into one or two rooms, where girls and boys sleep together, often on the same straw mattress; by economizing on clothing, linen, and cleaning materials; by giving up Sunday amusements — in short, by resolving on the most painful privations. Once this last limit is reached, the slightest rise in the price of provisions, a stoppage of work, an illness increases the worker's misery and ruins him completely. Debts pile up, credit is refused, clothes and the most necessary furniture go to the pawnshop, and finally the family asks to be entered on the list of paupers." (DE note [137]: Ducpétiaux, l.c.p. 151. 154 155, 156; EN attaches no numbered note here, instead closing the paragraph with an inline parenthetical citing only pp. 151, 154, 155 — omitting page 156, a citation difference preserved rather than reconciled.)

In fact, in this "paradise of capitalists," the slightest change in the price of the most necessary means of subsistence is followed by a change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See "Manifest der Maatschappij: De Vlamingen Vooruit!," Brussels 1860, p. 12 — EN cites the same Manifesto at pp. 15, 16 instead, a page discrepancy preserved rather than reconciled.) The whole of Belgium counts 930,000 families, of which, according to official statistics: 90,000 are wealthy (voters) = 450,000 persons; 390,000 families belong to the petty middle class, in town and village, a great part of them constantly falling into the proletariat, = 1,950,000 persons. Finally 450,000 working-class families = 2,250,000 persons, of whom the model families enjoy the happiness described by Ducpétiaux. Among the 450,000 working-class families, over 200,000 are on the list of paupers!

Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalist production and accumulation assert itself more brutally than in the progress of English agriculture (cattle-breeding included) and the retrogression of the English agricultural labourer. Before turning to his present situation, a rapid retrospect: modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the eighteenth century, although the revolution in landed-property relations, from which the changed mode of production starts as its basis, is of much earlier date. (DE and EN align one-to-one at this opening pid, en[1]; no split or discrepancy.)

Taking Arthur Young — a careful observer, though a superficial thinker — on the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter cuts a very pitiable figure compared with his predecessor at the end of the fourteenth century, "where he could live in plenty and accumulate wealth" (note 138; EN [75]), not to speak of the fifteenth century, "the golden age of the English labourer in town and country." We need not, however, go back so far: a very substantial work of 1777 reads. (EN expands this single DE paragraph into three separate rows, p2-p4 — Young's lead-in, the fourteenth-century quotation, and the fifteenth-century/1777 transition — while DE keeps them as one continuous paragraph; no content is added or dropped by the split.)

"The great farmer has raised himself almost to the level of the gentleman, while the poor agricultural labourer is pressed almost to the ground. His unfortunate condition appears clearly from a comparative view of his circumstances today and forty years earlier ... Landowner and farmer work hand in hand to keep the labourer down." (Note 139; EN [76], which glosses "him" as "[the gentleman]" and orders the comparison as "only forty years ago, and at present" rather than DE's "von heute und von 40 Jahr früher" — both phrasings preserved as printed.)

It is then shown in detail that real agricultural wages fell by nearly a quarter, or 25 per cent, between 1737 and 1777.

"Modern policy," says Dr. Richard Price at the same time, "favours the higher classes of the people; the consequence will be that sooner or later the whole kingdom will consist only of gentlemen and beggars, of grandees and slaves." (Note 140; EN [77].)

Yet the condition of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780 — in food and housing as much as in self-respect, amusements, and so on — is an ideal never again attained. Expressed in pints of wheat, his average wage was 90 pints in 1770-71, only 65 in Eden's time (1797), but 60 in 1808. (Note 141; EN [78].)

The condition of the agricultural labourers at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War — during which landed aristocrats, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stock-exchange speculators, army contractors, and the like enriched themselves so extraordinarily — was already indicated earlier. Nominal wages rose partly from the depreciation of banknotes, partly from a rise in the price of prime necessities independent of that depreciation; but the real movement of wages can be established very simply, without recourse to details unnecessary here. The Poor Law and its administration were the same in 1795 and 1814. It will be remembered how this law was handled in the countryside: in the form of alms, the parish made up the nominal wage to the nominal sum required for the labourer's bare vegetation. The ratio between the wage paid by the farmer and the wage-deficit made good by the parish shows us two things: first, the fall of wages below their minimum; second, the degree to which the agricultural labourer was compounded of wage-labourer and pauper — the degree, that is, to which he had been turned into a serf of his parish. We choose a county representing the average ratio across all others: in 1795 the average weekly wage in Northamptonshire was 7s. 6d., the annual total expenditure of a family of six persons £36 12s. 5d., their total income £29 18s., the deficit made good by the parish £6 14s. 5d.; in the same county in 1814 the weekly wage was 12s. 2d., the annual total expenditure of a family of five persons £54 18s. 4d., their total income £36 2s., the deficit made good by the parish £18 6s. 4d. (note 142, which cites Parry at page 80 — EN's equivalent note [79] cites page 86 instead, both retained as printed without reconciliation). In 1795 the deficit was less than a quarter of the wage; in 1814, more than half. It goes without saying that under these conditions the meagre comforts Eden still found in the agricultural labourer's cottage had vanished by 1814 (note 143; EN [80]). Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer — the instrumentum vocale — remained from then on the most overworked, the worst fed, and the most brutally treated. (DE alone glosses this Latin phrase in brackets as <sprachbegabte Werkzeug>, "the tool endowed with speech"; EN leaves the Latin unglossed.) DE and EN align one-to-one here as a single dense paragraph, en[9]; every clause the curation round proposed for cutting — war enrichment, nominal-wage movement, disappearance of cottage comforts, instrumentum vocale — remains fully rendered, alongside the two KEEP sentences on parish supplementation of the nominal wage and on wages falling below minimum/parish serfdom.

The same state of things continued quietly, until

"the Swing risings of 1830 revealed to us" (that is, to the ruling classes) "by the blazing light of the corn-ricks, that misery and dark, mutinous discontent smouldered just as fiercely beneath the surface of agricultural as of industrial England." (Note 144; EN [81].)

Sadler at that time christened the agricultural labourers "white slaves" in the House of Commons, and a bishop echoed the epithet in the House of Lords. The most notable political economist of that period, E. G. Wakefield, says:

"The agricultural labourer of Southern England is no slave; he is no free man; he is a pauper." (Note 145; EN [82], which reverses the clause order to "not a freeman, nor ... a slave" before "he is a pauper" — both orderings preserved as printed.)

The period immediately before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the condition of the agricultural labourers. On the one hand, it served the interest of the bourgeois agitators to show how little those protective laws actually protected the real corn-producers. On the other, the industrial bourgeoisie foamed with rage at the landed aristocracy's denunciation of factory conditions, at the affected sympathy of these thoroughly corrupt, heartless, and genteel idlers for the sufferings of the factory worker, and at their "diplomatic zeal" for factory legislation. It is an old English proverb that when two thieves fall out something useful always happens; and indeed the noisy, passionate quarrel between the two factions of the ruling class over which of them exploited the worker more shamelessly became, on both sides, midwife to the truth. Earl Shaftesbury, alias Lord Ashley, was the champion of the aristocratic anti-factory philanthropy campaign, and so became in 1844-45 (EN gives only "1845," a date discrepancy preserved without reconciliation) a favourite subject in the "Morning Chronicle"'s revelations on the condition of agricultural workers. That paper, then the most important Liberal organ, sent its own commissioners into the rural districts, who did not content themselves with general description and statistics but published the names both of the labouring families examined and of their landlords. The following list gives wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blandford, Wimborne, and Poole. (DE and EN align one-to-one at this opening, en[14], but EN's own p14 additionally absorbs the whole of DE's following paragraph, p13, as a verified continuation with no separate EN row of its own.)

The villages are the property of Mr. G. Bankes and of the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that this pope of the "low church," this head of the English pietists, pockets — like p.p. Bankes — a considerable part of the labourers' miserable wages back again under the pretext of house-rent. (This sentence is carried entirely inside EN's p14, with no separate EN row of its own; the alignment register marks it a verified continuation, not an omission.)

"Kinder" — "Children" — stands alone as the wage table's opening column label. EN's own display, by contrast, is carried entirely at EN p15, where it opens with the heading "FIRST VILLAGE" followed by the row label "(a) Children."

The binding three-village wage table (rendered here through EN's clearer labelled rows, since DE prints the identical figures as a dense, unlabelled run of column headers — "Zahl der Familienglieder," "Wöchentlicher Arbeitslohn der Männer," "Wöchentlicher Kinderlohn," "Wocheneinnahme der Gesamtfamilie," "Wöchentliche Hausmiete," "Gesamtwochenlohn nach Abzug der Hausmiete," "Wochenlohn per Kopf" — followed by bare columns of figures rather than an aligned grid; both layouts carry the same underlying data). First village, six families: (a) children 2, 3, 2, 2, 6, 3; (b) family members 4, 5, 4, 4, 8, 5; (c) men's weekly wage 8s., 8s., 8s., 8s., 7s., 7s.; (d) children's weekly wage —, —, —, —, 1/-·1/6, 1/-·2/-; (e) weekly family income 8s., 8s., 8s., 8s., 10s.6d., 7s.; (f) weekly rent 2s., 1s.6d., 1s., 1s., 2s., 1s.4d.; (g) total weekly wage after rent 6s., 6s.6d., 7s., 7s., 8s.6d., 5s.8d.; (h) weekly income per head 1s.6d., 1s.3½d., 1s.9d., 1s.9d., 1s.0¾d., 1s.1½d. Second village, five families: (a) children 6, 6, 8, 4, 3; (b) members 8, 8, 10, 6, 5; (c) men's wage 7s. throughout; (d) children's wage 1/-·1/6, 1/-·1/6, —, —, —; (e) family income 10s., 7s., 7s., 7s., 7s.; (f) rent 1s.6d., 1s.3½d., 1s.3½d., 1s.6½d., 1s.6½d.; (g) total after rent 8s.6d., 5s.8½d., 5s.8½d., 5s.5½d., 5s.5½d.; (h) per head 1s.0¾d., 0s.8½d., 0s.7d., 0s.11d., 1s.1d. Third village, three families: (a) children 4, 3, 0; (b) members 6, 5, 2; (c) men's wage 7s., 7s., 5s.; (d) children's wage —, 1/-·2/-, 1/-·2/6; (e) family income 7s., 11s.6d., 5s.; (f) rent 1s., 0s.10d., 1s.; (g) total after rent 6s., 10s.8d., 4s.; (h) per head 1s., 2s.1⅗d., 2s. The footnote apparatus is crossed at this table's close: DE attaches note 146 — a bare citation of the "London Economist," 29 March 1845, p. 290 — here, while the thematically parallel content, the landed aristocracy's own state-fund advance for drainage, appears instead as EN's note [83], also attached at this same table-closing position; DE carries that state-fund content as its own separate note 147, attached instead at the drainage sentence on the following pid. Both crossed attachments are preserved without repair.

The abolition of the Corn Laws gave English agriculture an enormous jolt: drainage on the largest scale (note 147 — the landed aristocracy's own self-advanced, Parliament-secured state funds for this purpose, at low interest, to be repaid by the farmers at a much higher rate; EN's equivalent note [83] is instead attached at the close of the preceding wage table, EN p15, a crossed placement preserved without repair), a new system of stall-feeding and of cultivating artificial fodder crops, the introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new treatment of clay soils, increased use of mineral fertilisers, application of the steam engine and every kind of new working machinery, and more intensive cultivation generally, characterise this epoch. The president of the royal — (DE breaks off mid-clause here, continuing directly into DE p17's "Agricultural Society, Mr. Pusey, states"; EN instead keeps the whole Pusey clause intact within its own p16, along with its note [84] citing the "London Economist," 29 May 1845, p. 290 — the same citation DE attaches as its bare note 146 at the wage table's close on the preceding pid.)

Agricultural Society, Mr. Pusey, declares that the (relative) costs of farming have been reduced by nearly half through the newly introduced machinery. On the other hand, the actual yield of the soil rose rapidly: greater capital outlay per acre, and so also accelerated concentration of tenancies, was the fundamental condition of the new method (note 148; EN [85]). At the same time the cultivated area expanded by 464,119 acres between 1846 and 1856, not to mention the great tracts of the eastern counties transformed from rabbit-warrens and poor pasture into luxuriant cornfields. It is already known that, simultaneously, the total number of persons engaged in agriculture fell; as for the actual agricultural labourers of both sexes and all ages, their number sank from 1.241.269 in 1851 to 1.163.217 in 1861 — EN prints 1,241,396 to 1,163,217, both retained as printed without reconciliation (note 149; EN [86]). If the English Registrar-General therefore rightly remarks that "the increase of farmers and agricultural labourers since 1801 bears no proportion whatever to the increase of agricultural produce" (note 150; EN [87]), this disproportion holds all the more for the most recent period, in which a positive decrease of the rural working population went hand in hand with the extension of the cultivated area, more intensive cultivation, an unheard-of accumulation of capital incorporated in the soil and devoted to its working, an increase in the produce of the soil without parallel in the history of English agronomy, swollen rent-rolls for the landowners, and the growing wealth of the capitalist farmers. Taking this together with the ceaseless, rapid extension of the urban market and the reign of free trade, the agricultural labourer was at last, post tot discrimina rerum — after so many turning-points of fortune — placed in circumstances that, secundum artem — by the rules of the art — ought to have made him drunk with happiness. (In EN, the machinery/Pusey opening and the population-fall figure both fall within EN p16, the Registrar-General quotation is EN's own p17, and the disproportion-and-irony close is EN's own p18 — a non-identity split of this single DE paragraph across three EN rows.)

Professor Rogers, by contrast, concludes that the English agricultural labourer today — not to speak of his predecessor in the last half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century, but only compared with his predecessor of 1770-1780 — has seen his condition worsen extraordinarily, that "he has again become a serf," and a badly fed and badly housed serf at that (note 151; EN [88]) — Rogers's own attributed judgment, kept distinct from Marx's framing voice. Dr. Julian Hunter, in his epoch-making report on the housing of agricultural labourers, says:

"The cost of the hind" (a name for the agricultural labourer inherited from the age of serfdom) "is fixed at the lowest possible sum on which he can live ... his wages and shelter are not calculated on the profit to be extracted from him. He is a zero in the farmer's calculations" (note 152; EN [89]) "... his means of subsistence are always treated as a fixed quantity." (Note 153; EN [90].) "As for any further reduction of his income, he can say: nihil habeo, nihil curo — I have nothing, I care about nothing. He has no fear for the future, because he possesses nothing beyond what is absolutely indispensable to his existence. He has reached the freezing-point from which the farmer's calculations take their data. Come what may, he shares in neither happiness nor misfortune." (Note 154; EN [91].) Hunter's attributed account throughout; not Marx's own voice.

In 1863 an official inquiry took place into the food and labour conditions of criminals sentenced to transportation and public forced labour; its results are laid down in two thick Blue Books.

"A careful comparison," it says among other things, "between the diet of the criminals in the prisons of England and that of the paupers in workhouses and of the free agricultural labourers of the same country shows indisputably that the former are far better nourished than either of the two other classes" (note 155; EN [92]), while "the mass of labour demanded of one sentenced to public forced labour amounts to about half of that performed by the ordinary agricultural labourer." (Note 156; EN [93].)

A few characteristic pieces of testimony: John Smith, governor of Edinburgh prison, examined.

No. 5056: "The diet of the English prisons is superior to that of ordinary labourers in England" (EN's more compact phrasing of DE's "ist viel besser als die der gewöhnlichen Landarbeiter"). No. 5057: "It is a fact that the ordinary agricultural labourers of Scotland very seldom get any meat at all" (EN instead prints this deposition's number as "No 50," a discrepancy preserved exactly as printed rather than corrected to 5057). No. 3047: "Do you know of any reason for the necessity of feeding the criminals much better (much better) than ordinary labourers? — Certainly not." No. 3048: "Do you consider it proper to make further experiments, to bring the diet of prisoners condemned to public forced labour closer to the diet of free labourers?" (note 157; EN [94], which glosses the respondent in what follows as "[the agricultural labourer]"). "The agricultural labourer," it is said, "might say: I work hard and have not enough to eat; when I was in prison I did not work so hard and had food in plenty, and therefore it is better for me to be in prison than at liberty." (Note 158; EN [95].)

From the tables appended to the first volume of the report, a comparative overview has been compiled (EN casts this in the first person — "I have compiled the annexed comparative summary" — where DE keeps the impersonal "ist ... zusammengestellt," "has been compiled"; both voicings preserved as printed). DE and EN align one-to-one here, en[25]; no note is attached.

The binding weekly-nutrient display (note 158a, attached at DE's table heading, "Wöchentlicher Nahrungsbetrag"; EN's equivalent [96] instead attaches at the table's final row label, "Agricultural labourer," a difference of attachment position preserved without repair) gives, in nitrogenous, non-nitrogenous, mineral, and total ounces: the Portland convict 28.95 (DE 28,95), 150.06, 4.68, 183.69; the sailor in the royal navy 29.63, 152.91, 4.52, 187.06; the soldier 25.55, 114.49, 3.94, 143.98; the working coachmaker 24.53, 162.06, 4.23, 190.82; the compositor 21.24, 100.83, 3.12, 125.19; the agricultural labourer 17.73, 118.06, 3.29, 139.08. DE prints every figure with a decimal comma, EN with a decimal point; neither is recomputed or corrected.

The general result of the 1863 medical commission of inquiry into the food of the worse-nourished classes is already known to the reader. He will remember that the diet of a great part of the agricultural labourers' families stands below the minimum "to arrest starvation diseases." This is especially the case in all the purely agricultural districts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wilts, Stafford, Oxford, Berks, and Herts. DE and EN align one-to-one here, en[27]; no note is attached.

"The nourishment the agricultural labourer receives," says Dr. Smith, "is larger than the average quantity indicates, since he himself receives a far larger share of food indispensable to his labour than the other members of his family — in the poorer districts, almost all the meat or bacon. The quantity of food that falls to the wife, and likewise to the children in their period of rapid growth, is in many cases, and indeed in almost every county, deficient, chiefly in nitrogen." (Note 159, which cites the Public Health Sixth Report as 1863; EN's equivalent note [97] cites the same Sixth Report as 1864, a date discrepancy preserved without reconciliation.)

The men-servants and maid-servants living with the farmers themselves are abundantly nourished. Their number fell from 288.277 in 1851 to 204.962 in 1861 (EN prints the same figures with commas, 288,277 and 204,962). DE and EN align one-to-one here, en[29]; no note is attached.

"Women's labour in the open field," says Dr. Smith, "whatever other disadvantages may accompany it, is under present circumstances of great advantage to the family, for it supplies it with means for footwear, clothing, and the payment of house-rent, and so enables it to eat better." (Note 160; EN [98].)

One of the most remarkable results of this inquiry was that the agricultural labourer in England is by far worse nourished than in the other parts of the United Kingdom ("is considerably the worst fed"), as the table shows. EN carries this same lead-in at its own p31, immediately ahead of the carbon/nitrogen display, into which EN folds DE's following heading as a single row.

"Wöchentlicher Konsum von Kohlenstoff und Stickstoff durch den ländlichen Durchschnittsarbeiter" — "Weekly consumption of carbon and nitrogen by the average rural labourer" — stands alone as the table's heading. EN carries no separate heading row of its own here: its own p31 instead holds DE p30's "worst fed" lead-in, and this heading is folded directly into the table itself at EN's own p32.

The binding display, in grains of carbon and grains of nitrogen: England, DE 40.673 against EN 46,673, and 1.594 / 1,594 nitrogen; Wales, 48.354 / 48,354 and 2.031 / 2,031; Scotland, 48.980 / 48,980 and 2.348 / 2,348; Ireland, 43.366 / 43,366 and 2.434 / 2,434 (note 161; EN [99]). Neither England figure is corrected toward the other. The same note states that the English agricultural labourer receives only 1/5 as much breadstuff as the Irish in DE, against only 1/2 as much bread in EN, and dates its own citation of Dr. Hunter's Welsh evidence to the "Public Health, Seventh Report, 1864" in DE against "1865" in EN — every figure and date preserved without reconciliation.

"To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of the house accommodation generally had," says Dr. Simon in his official Health Report, "by our agricultural labourers, almost every page of Dr. Hunter's report bears testimony" — a nested attribution, Simon's official report quoting Hunter's own. "And gradually, for many years past, the state of the labourer in these respects has been deteriorating, house-room being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and, when found, greatly less suitable to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been the case. Especially within the last twenty or thirty years the evil has been in very rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches see fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the land which he contributes to till, whether the house-room he gets shall be human or swinish, whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his poverty — all this does not depend on his willingness and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make of their 'right to do as they will with their own.' However large may be a farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of labourers' dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain ... An extraneous element weighs the balance heavily against him ..., the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions concerning settlement and chargeability" (note 162; EN [100], which glosses that the law was somewhat improved in 1865). "Under this influence each parish has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident labourers: for, unhappily, agricultural labour, instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hardworking labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism — a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so near that any illness or temporary failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief — and thus all residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor-rates ... Large proprietors" (note 163; EN [101], defining "close" and "open" villages) "have but to resolve that there shall be no labourers' dwellings on their estates, and their estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsibility for the poor. How far it has been intended, in the English constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in land should be acquirable, and that a landlord 'doing as he wills with his own' should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens, whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to discuss ... For that power of eviction does not exist only in theory. On a very large scale it prevails in practice — prevails as a main governing condition in the household circumstances of agricultural labour ... As regards the extent of the evil, it may suffice to refer to the evidence which Dr. Hunter has compiled from the last census, that destruction of houses, notwithstanding increased local demands for them, had, during the last ten years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes or townships of England, so that, irrespectively of persons who had been forced to become non-resident" (that is, in the parish in which they work) "these parishes and townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population 5 1/3 per cent greater, into house-room 4 1/2 per cent less ... When the process of depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr. Hunter, is a show-village where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but persons who are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers are allowed to live — regular servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class" (note 164; EN [102], which supplies the Market Harboro shepherd anecdote). "But the land requires cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed upon it are not the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open village, perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received them when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things are tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand testify, in their unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are doomed. They are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While the shelter holds together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad enough he will often be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no repair, no improvement shall it receive, except such as its penniless occupants can supply. And when at last it becomes quite uninhabitable, it will be but one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will be somewhat lightened. While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates through the depopulation of lands over which they have control, the nearest town or open village receives the evicted labourers — the nearest, I say, but this 'nearest' may mean three or four miles distant from the farm where the labourer has his daily toil. To that daily toil there will then have to be added, as though it were nothing, the daily need of walking six or eight miles for power of earning his bread. And whatever farm-work is done by his wife and children is done at the same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil which the distance occasions him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy scraps of land, which they throng as densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And into those wretched habitations — which, even where they adjoin the open country, share some of the worst features of the worst town residences — crowd the agricultural labourers of England" (note 165; EN [103], on the beer-seller or grocer as the labourer's second master and on the open villages as the "penal settlements" of the English agricultural proletariat) "... Nor, on the other hand, must it be supposed that even when the labourer is housed upon the lands which he cultivates, his household circumstances are generally such as his life of productive industry would seem to deserve. Even on princely estates his cottage may be of the meanest description. There are landlords who deem any stye good enough for their labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent" (note 166; EN [104], on the landlord's power to dictate wages and the terms of leaving service). "It may be but a ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden — but the labourer is helpless against the wrong. And the Nuisances Removal Acts are a mere dead letter, in great part dependent for their working on such cottage-owners as the one from whom his hovel is rented ... From brighter, but exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice that attention should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts which are a reproach to the civilisation of England. Lamentable indeed must be the case when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their mere numerical insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of rural labourers' dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For, again and again, in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic disease in rural districts have insisted on the extreme importance of that over-crowding as an influence which renders it a quite hopeless task to attempt the limiting of any infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been pointed out that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences of country life, the crowding which so favours the extension of contagious disease also favours the origination of disease which is not contagious. And those who have denounced the over-crowded state of our rural population have not been silent as to a further mischief. Even where their primary concern has been only with the injury to health, almost perforce they have referred to other sides of the subject. In showing how frequently it happens that adult persons of both sexes, married and unmarried, are huddled together in single small sleeping rooms, their reports have carried the conviction that, under the circumstances they describe, decency must always be outraged, and morality almost of necessity must suffer" (note 167; EN [105], reporting a rural policeman's testimony on the boldness of village girls) "... Thus, for instance, in the appendix of my last report, Dr. Ord, in his report on the outbreak of fever at Wing in Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man from Wingrave came there with fever; in the first days of his illness he slept with nine other

persons in one chamber. Within a fortnight several persons were seized; in the course of a few weeks five of the nine fell ill of the fever, and one died! At the same time Dr. Harvey, of St. George's Hospital, who visited Wing during the epidemic on private professional business, reported to me in the same sense (DE encloses his testimony in single quotation marks, EN in double; the differing convention is preserved rather than normalized): "A young woman down with fever slept at night in the same room with father, mother, her bastard child, two young men, her brothers, and her two sisters, each with a bastard child — ten persons in all. A few weeks before, thirteen children had slept in the same room." (Note 168, which cites the Public Health Seventh Report as 1864; EN's equivalent note [106] — attached within EN's own single continuous p33, since EN merges DE p33-p34 into one row — cites the same Seventh Report as 1865; both dates preserved without reconciliation.)

Dr. Hunter investigated 5.375 agricultural-labourers' cottages, not only in the purely agricultural districts, but in all the counties of England. Of these 5.375, 2.195 had only one bedroom (often serving also as a living-room), 2.930 only two, and 250 more than two. I will give, for a dozen counties, a short gleaning (EN: "a few specimens culled from a dozen counties"). DE and EN align one-to-one here, en[34]; no note is attached.

1. Bedfordshire. (EN: "(1.) Bedfordshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Wrestlingworth: bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, though many are smaller. The small one-storey cot is often divided by boards into two sleeping-rooms, sometimes with a bed in a kitchen 5 feet 6 inches high. Rent £3. Tenants must build their own privies; the landlord supplies only a hole. As soon as one is built, the whole neighbourhood makes use of it. One house, named Richardson, of unapproachable beauty: its plaster walls bulged out like a lady's dress in a curtsey; one gable end was convex, the other concave, and on the latter, unfortunately, stood a chimney, a crooked tube of clay and wood like an elephant's trunk, with a long stick serving as a prop against its falling; door and window rhomboidal. Of 17 houses visited, only 4 had more than one bedroom, and these four were overcrowded: the one-bedroom cots sheltered 3 adults with 3 children, a married couple with 6 children, and so on.

Dunton: high house-rents, from £4 to £5, men's weekly wage 10s. They hope to make up the rent through the family's straw-plaiting. The higher the rent, the greater the number that must join together to pay it. Six adults, with 4 children, in one sleeping-room, pay £3 10s. for it. The cheapest house in Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad, lets for £3. Only one of the 14 houses examined had two bedrooms. A little outside the village, a house whose occupants "dunged against the house-side," the lower 9 inches of the door eaten away by sheer rot, some bricks ingeniously pushed up from inside each evening at locking-time and hung with a bit of matting; half a window, glass and frame together, had gone the way of all flesh. Here, without furniture, 3 adults and 5 children huddled together. Dunton is no worse than the rest of the Biggleswade Union.

2. Berkshire. (EN: "(2.) Berkshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Beenham: in June 1864 a man, wife, and 4 children lived in a cot (one-storey cottage). A daughter came home from service with scarlet fever; she died. A child sickened and died. The mother and one child lay with typhus when Dr. Hunter was called in. The father and one child slept elsewhere, but the difficulty of securing isolation showed itself here, for in the crowded market of the wretched village the linen of the fever-stricken household lay waiting for the wash. — The rent of H.'s house 1s. weekly; the one bedroom for a couple and 6 children. A house let for 8d. (weekly), 14 feet 6 inches long, 7 feet broad, kitchen 6 feet high; the bedroom without window, fireplace, door, or opening except into the passage, no garden. A man lately lived here with two grown-up daughters and a growing son; father and son slept on the bed, the girls in the passage. Each had a child while the family lived here, though one went to the workhouse for her confinement and then returned home.

3. Buckinghamshire. (EN: "(3.) Buckinghamshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

30 cottages — on 1,000 acres of land — contain here about 130-140 persons. The parish of Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres; it had, in 1851, 36 houses and a population of 84 males and 54 females. This sexual inequality was partly remedied by 1861, when it counted 98 of the male and 87 of the female sex, an increase over 10 years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile the number of houses had fallen by one.

Winslow: a great part newly built, in good style; demand for houses appears considerable, since very wretched cots let at 1s. and 1s. 3d. per week.

Water Eaton: here the owners, in the face of a growing population, have destroyed about 20 per cent of the existing houses. A poor labourer, who had about 4 miles to go to his work, answered the question whether he could not find a cot nearer: "No; they'll take damned good care not to take in a man with my large family" (DE's "sie werden sich verdammt hüten" carries a coarser idiom than EN's more genteel "they know better than to take a man in with my large family"; both phrasings preserved as printed).

Tinker's End, near Winslow: one bedroom holding, per DE, 4 adults and 5 children — EN prints 4 adults and 4 children, both retained without reconciliation — 11 feet long, 9 feet broad, 6 feet 5 inches high at its highest point; a second room, DE's 11 feet 7 inches long against EN's 11 feet 3 inches, 9 feet broad, 5 feet 10 inches high, sheltered 6 persons. Each of these families had less space than is thought necessary for a galley convict (DE's harsher "Galeerensträfling" against EN's plain "convict," both preserved as printed). No house had more than one bedroom, none a back door; water very scarce; weekly rent from 1s. 4d. to 2s. Of 16 houses examined, only one held a man earning 10s. weekly. The air-reservoir allowed each person in this case corresponds to what he would get shut nightly into a box 4 feet cubic — though the old hovels did offer a mass of unintentional, naturally occurring ventilation.

4. Cambridgeshire. (EN: "(4.) Cambridgeshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Gamblingay belongs to several owners. It contains the raggedest cots to be found anywhere. Much straw-plaiting. A deadly lassitude, a hopeless surrender to filth (DE leaves this judgment as unquoted continuous prose; EN sets it off in quotation marks, both conventions preserved) governs Gamblingay. The neglect at its centre becomes torment at its extremities, north and south, where the houses rot away piecemeal. The absentee landlords bleed this poor rookery too freely. Rents are very high: 8 to 9 persons packed into one single-bedroom room, in two cases 6 adults with 1 and 2 children each crowded into one small bedroom.

5. Essex. (EN: "(5.) Essex.") Binding county-heading carrier.

In this county, in many parishes, the decline of persons and of cottages goes hand in hand. Yet in no fewer than 22 parishes house destruction has not halted population growth nor produced the expulsion that everywhere else passes under the name "migration to the towns." In Fingringhoe, a parish of 3,443 acres, there stood 145 houses in 1851, only 110 in 1861, but the people refused to leave and managed to increase even under this treatment. At Ramsden Crays, 252 persons inhabited 61 houses in 1851, but by 1861, 262 persons were squeezed into 49 houses. At Basildon (EN: Basilden, preserved without reconciliation) 157 persons lived on 1,827 acres in 35 houses in 1851, by the decade's end 180 persons in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South Fambridge, Widford, Basildon, and Ramsden Crays — EN's closing list instead spells the last "Ramsden Crags," an additional unreconciled variant beyond the register's named Basildon/Basilden pair — 1,392 (DE breaks its sentence here, continuing directly into DE p50, a verified continuation with no separate EN row of its own; EN carries the whole figure unbroken) persons lived on 8,449 acres in 1851.

persons in 316 houses; in 1861, on the same area, 1,473 persons in 249 houses. (This sentence is carried entirely inside EN's single continuous p48, with no separate EN row of its own; the alignment register marks it a verified continuation, not an omission.)

6. Herefordshire. (EN: "(6.) Herefordshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

This small county has suffered more from the "eviction-spirit" than any other in England. At Madley (EN: Nadby, preserved without reconciliation) belong the overstuffed cottages, mostly with 2 bedrooms, largely owned by the farmers themselves. They readily let them at £3 or £4 a year and pay a weekly wage of 9s.!

7. Huntingdonshire. (EN: "(7.) Huntingdon" — the shortened form, preserved without reconciliation.) Binding county-heading carrier.

Hartford had 87 houses in 1851; shortly after, 19 cottages were destroyed in this small parish of 1,720 acres; population 452 in 1831, DE's 382 in 1851 against EN's 382 in 1852 (both dates preserved without reconciliation), and 341 in 1861. Fourteen single-bedroom cots examined. In one, a married couple, 3 grown sons, 1 grown daughter, 4 children — 10 in all; in another, 3 adults, 6 children. One of these rooms, in which 8 persons slept, was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2 inches broad, 6 feet 9 inches high; the average, without deducting for projections, gave about 130 cubic feet per head. In the 14 sleeping rooms, 34 adults and 33 children. These cottages are seldom furnished with gardens, but many occupants could rent small scraps of land, 10 or 12s. per rood (1/4 acre). These allotments lie far from the privy-less houses. The family must either go to its allotment to deposit its excrement or, as happens here (with respect), fill the drawer of a chest with it; once full, it is drawn out and emptied where its contents are needed. In Japan the cycle of living conditions proceeds more cleanly than this.

8. Lincolnshire. (EN: "(8.) Lincolnshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Langtoft: a man lives here, in Wright's house, with his wife, her mother, and 5 children; the house has a front kitchen, scullery, and bedroom over the front kitchen; front kitchen and bedroom 12 feet 2 inches long, 9 feet 5 inches broad; the whole ground floor DE's 21 feet 3 inches long against EN's 21 feet 2 inches (both preserved without reconciliation), 9 feet 5 inches broad. The bedroom is a garret: the walls run together sugarloaf-fashion at the ceiling, with a dormer-window opening in front. Why did he live here? The garden? Extraordinarily tiny. The rent? High, 1s. 3d. a week. Near his work? No, 6 miles off, so that he marches 12 miles daily, back and forth. He lived there because it was a rentable cot and because he wanted a cot for himself alone, anywhere, at any price, in any condition. What follows is the statistic of 12 houses in Langtoft with 12 bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36 children:

The binding twelve-house Langtoft display (rendered here through a readable per-house ordering that both DE's two-panel layout and EN's column layout encode identically once reconciled, since DE prints its data as two side-by-side six-house panels while EN prints four continuous rows of twelve; both layouts carry the same underlying data with one exception noted below): House 1, 1 bedroom, 3 adults, 5 children, 8 persons; House 2, 1 bedroom, 4 adults, 3 children, 7 persons; House 3, 1 bedroom, 4 adults, 4 children, 8 persons; House 4, 1 bedroom, 5 adults, 4 children, 9 persons; House 5, 1 bedroom, 2 adults, 2 children, 4 persons; House 6, 1 bedroom, 5 adults, 3 children, 8 persons; House 7, 1 bedroom, 3 adults, 3 children, 6 persons; House 8, 1 bedroom, 3 adults, 2 children, 5 persons; House 9, 1 bedroom, 2 adults, 0 children, 2 persons; House 10, 1 bedroom, 2 adults, 3 children, DE 5 persons against EN's malformed ".5" persons (preserved as printed, not corrected to 5); House 11, 1 bedroom, 3 adults, 3 children, 6 persons; House 12, 1 bedroom, 2 adults, 4 children, 6 persons.

9. Kent. (EN: "(9.) Kent.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Kennington, most sadly overcrowded in 1859, when diphtheria appeared and the parish doctor undertook an official inquiry into the condition of the poorer classes. He found that in this locality, where much labour is needed, various cots had been destroyed and none newly built. In one district stood 4 houses, called birdcages (DE glosses this in brackets as "Vogelkäfige"; EN leaves the English word unglossed); each had 4 rooms of the following dimensions in feet and inches:

Küche — Kitchen — stands alone as this compact display's first room label. EN's own display, by contrast, carries the label and its dimensions together in one row at EN p58: "Kitchen: 9 ft. 5 by 8 ft. 11 by 6 ft. 6."

9,5 x 8,11 x 6,6 — the kitchen's dimensions, carried entirely inside EN's own p58 alongside the label; the alignment register marks this a verified continuation, not an omission.

Spülkammer — Scullery — stands alone as this compact display's second room label. EN's own display again carries label and dimensions together in one row at EN p59: "Scullery: 8 ft. 6 by 4 ft. 6 by 6 ft. 6."

8,6 x 4,60 x 6,6 — the scullery's dimensions, carried entirely inside EN's own p59 alongside the label as "8 ft. 6 by 4 ft. 6 by 6 ft. 6"; the alignment register marks this a verified continuation, not an omission. DE's trailing zero in "4,60" against EN's bare "4 ft. 6" is preserved without repair, one of Kent's zero-bearing dimension discrepancies.

Schlafzimmer — Bedroom — stands alone as this compact display's third room label. EN's own display carries label and dimensions together in one row at EN p60: "Bedroom: 8 ft. 5 by 5 ft. 10 by 6 ft. 3."

8,5 x 5,10 x 6,3 — the first bedroom's dimensions, carried entirely inside EN's own p60 alongside the label as "8 ft. 5 by 5 ft. 10 by 6 ft. 3"; the alignment register marks this a verified continuation, not an omission.

Schlafzimmer — Bedroom — stands alone as this compact display's fourth and final room label. EN's own display carries label and dimensions together in one row at EN p61: "Bedroom: 8 ft. 3 by 8 ft. 4 by 6 ft. 3."

8,3 x 8,40 x 6,3 — the second bedroom's dimensions, carried entirely inside EN's own p61 alongside the label as "8 ft. 3 by 8 ft. 4 by 6 ft. 3"; the alignment register marks this a verified continuation, not an omission. DE's trailing zero in "8,40" against EN's bare "8 ft. 4" is preserved without repair, completing Kent's two zero-bearing dimension discrepancies alongside p63's "4,60." None of Kent's eight compact rows is collapsed into a non-carrier.

10. Northamptonshire. (EN: "(10.) Northamptonshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Brixworth, Pitsford, and Floore (EN: Brinworth, Pickford and Floore, preserved without reconciliation): in these villages 20-30 men loiter about the streets in winter for want of work. The farmers do not always cultivate the corn- and root-land sufficiently, and the landlord has found it convenient to throw all his farms together into 2 or 3 — hence the want of employment. While on one side of the ditch (DE "Graben") the field cries out for labour, the cheated labourers on the other side cast longing glances at it (EN instead has "wall," a minor phrasing difference preserved rather than normalized). Feverishly overworked in summer and half-starved in winter, it is no wonder that they say in their own dialect that "the parson and gentlefolks seem frit to death at them" (note 168a, glossed by DE as "Pfaff und Edelmann scheinen verschworen, sie tot zu hetzen"; EN carries no equivalent numbered note here, leaving the dialect phrase unglossed).

At Floore, examples of couples with 4, 5, 6 children in a single sleeping-room of the smallest size; likewise 3 adults with 5 children; likewise a couple with a grandfather and 6 scarlet-fever-stricken children, and so on; in 2 houses with 2 bedrooms, 2 families of 8 and 9 adults respectively.

11. Wiltshire. (EN: "(11.) Wiltshire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

Stratton: 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom; Penhill (EN: Pentill, preserved without reconciliation), in the same parish: a cot let at 1s. 3d. weekly to 4 adults and 4 children had nothing good about it beyond its walls, from its floor of rough-hewn stones to its worn-out thatch roof.

12. Worcestershire. (EN: "(12.) Worcestershire.") Binding county-heading carrier.

House-destruction here is not quite so severe; yet from 1851 to 1861 the number of persons per house rose, on average, from 4.2 to 4.6 (DE 4,2 zu 4,6; EN 4.2 to 4.6).

Badsey: many cots and little gardens here. Some farmers declare the cots "a great nuisance here, because they bring the poor" (DE supplies its own German gloss in parentheses, "Die Cots großer Mißstand, weil sie die Armen herbringen"; EN leaves the English quotation unglossed). On the statement of one gentleman:

"The poor are none the better for them; if you build 500 they will let fast enough, in fact, the more you build, the more they want" — according to this gentleman, the houses give birth to their own inhabitants, who then, by a law of nature, press upon "the means of housing." (EN splits this single DE sentence into two rows, p70-p71 — the gentleman's quotation, then the "law of nature" gloss in a parenthetical aside — while DE keeps them as one continuous sentence; no content is added or dropped by the split.) Dr. Hunter remarks:

"Now, these poor must come from somewhere, and since no particular attraction, such as doles, exists at Badsey, there must exist a repulsion from some still less convenient place that drives them here. Could each find a cot and a scrap of land near his workplace, he would certainly prefer it to Badsey, where he pays twice as much for his handful of ground as the farmer pays for his."

The constant emigration to the towns, the constant "making-superfluous" of labour in the countryside through the concentration of farms, the conversion of arable land into pasture, machinery, and so on, and the constant eviction of the rural population through the destruction of cottages, go hand in hand. The more depopulated the district, the greater its "relative surplus population," the greater its pressure on the means of employment, the greater the absolute excess of the rural people over their means of housing, and the greater, therefore, in the villages, the local overpopulation and the most pestilential packing-together of human beings. The packing-together of the human knot in scattered small villages and market towns corresponds to the violent draining-off of people from the land's surface. The uninterrupted "making-superfluous" of the agricultural labourers, despite their diminishing number and the growing mass of their product, is the cradle of their pauperism. Their eventual pauperism is a motive for their eviction and the chief source of their housing misery, which breaks their last power of resistance and makes them mere slaves of the landlords (note 169; EN [107]) and farmers, so that the minimum of wages fastens itself upon them as a law of nature. On the other hand, the land, despite its constant "relative surplus population," is at the same time under-populated — visible not only locally, where the efflux of people to towns, mines, and railway-building runs sharpest, but everywhere, at harvest-time as in spring and summer, in the many recurring moments when the very careful and intensive English agriculture needs extra hands. There are always too many agricultural labourers for average needs, and always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs of cultivation (note 170; EN [108]). Hence the official documents register the contradictory complaint, from the same places, of simultaneous labour shortage and labour surplus. The temporary or local want of labour brings about no rise in wages, but rather a forcing of women and children into field labour, and a descent to ever lower age levels. As soon as the exploitation of women and children gains a larger scope, it becomes in turn a new means of making the male agricultural labourer superfluous and of holding down his wage. In the east of England thrives a beautiful fruit of this cercle vicieux — the so-called gang system (Gang- or Bandensystem), to which this account briefly returns (note 171, citing Marx's own Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte at p. 88 sqq. with the MEW cross-reference Band 8, S. 198-204; EN [109] cites the same work at pp. 56 &c.; both bibliographic forms preserved without reconciliation). This mechanism is relative to capital's own workings, not an absolute Malthusian excess of people over subsistence, and is a present, ongoing feature of capitalist agriculture, not the historical act of primitive accumulation. All six of this paragraph's KEEP sentences (making-superfluous/concentration/eviction hand-in-hand; relative-surplus-and-crowding; pauperism-cradle; average-versus-exceptional needs; temporary-shortage-forces-women-and-children; renewed-male-redundancy) and all four DROP clauses (packing-of-the-knot; simultaneous-underpopulation; contradictory-shortage-and-surplus-complaint; gang-system-as-vicious-circle) are rendered above in full, per the DROP-means-full-rendition rule.

The gang system prevails almost exclusively in Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottinghamshire, sporadically in the neighbouring counties of Northampton, Bedford, and Rutland. Lincolnshire serves here as example. A large part of this county is new land — formerly marsh, or, as in other of the named eastern counties, only lately won from the sea. The steam engine has worked wonders for drainage; former morass and sandbank now bear a luxuriant sea of corn and the highest rents. The same holds of the alluvial land won by human effort, as on the Isle of Axholme and other parishes on the banks of the Trent. As the new farms arose, not only were no new cottages built, but old ones were torn down, the labour supply instead procured from open villages miles away, along roads winding past hillsides, where the population had formerly found its only shelter from the long winter floods. Labourers settled on farms of 400 to 1,000 acres (called here "confined labourers") serve exclusively for permanent, heavy, horse-assisted farm work. On every 100 acres there is, on average, scarcely one cottage (DE alone adds a parenthetical unit conversion here, "1 Acre = 40,49 Aren oder 1,584 preußische Morgen," not carried in EN). A Fenland farmer, for example, testifies before the Commission of Inquiry:

"My farm extends over 320 acres, all corn-land. It has no cottage. One labourer lives with me now. I have four horsemen lodging in the neighbourhood. The light work, for which many hands are needed, is done by gangs." (Note 172, which glosses "Fenland = Marschland" and cites "p. 37, n. 173"; EN [110] carries only the bare report citation, "Evidence 173, p. 37," without the Fenland gloss, both forms preserved without reconciliation.)

The soil requires much light field-work, such as weeding, hoeing, certain manuring operations, picking-up of stones, and so on. It is performed by the gangs, or organised bands, whose dwelling is in the open villages.

The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, namely women, young persons of both sexes (13-18 years, though boys mostly leave at 13), and finally children of both sexes (6 to 13 years). At its head stands the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, usually a so-called bad character, unsteady, drunken, but with a certain enterprise and savoir-faire. He recruits the gang, which works under him, not under the farmer. With the latter he usually agrees on piece-work, and his income, which on average rises not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer (note 173; EN [111]), depends almost entirely on the skill with which he knows how to extract, in the shortest possible time, as much labour as possible from his band. The farmers have discovered that women work steadily only under male direction, but that women and children, once set going, expend their life-force with real impetuosity — as Fourier already knew — while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to husband his as much as he can. The gang-master moves from one estate to another, employing his band 6 to 8 months of the year. His custom is therefore far more lucrative and secure for the labouring families than that of the individual farmer, who employs children only occasionally. This circumstance so firmly cements his influence in the open villages that children are mostly hireable only through his mediation; the individual lending-out of these children, apart from the gang, forms his secondary trade. This paragraph's three KEEP sentences (gang-composition-and-ages; gangmaster-hires-not-farmer; piecework-and-rapid-extraction) and its six DROP clauses (gangmaster-character; gendered-command-and-life-force-extraction; seasonal-inter-farm-employment; gangmaster-as-secure-employer; gangmaster-control-over-hiring; individual-child-lending) are all rendered above in full.

The "shady sides" of the system are the overwork of the children and young persons, the enormous marches they make daily to and from farms 5, 6, and sometimes 7 miles distant, and, finally, the demoralisation of the "gang." Although the gang-master, called "the driver" in some districts, is equipped with a long staff, he seldom uses it, and complaints of brutal treatment are the exception. He is a democratic emperor, or a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin; he needs popularity among his subjects, therefore, and binds them to himself through the gipsy-life flourishing under his auspices. Coarse licence, noisy high spirits, and the most obscene impudence lend the gang its wings. The gang-master usually pays out at a public house, then returns home reeling, propped left and right by a strapping woman, the children and young persons romping along behind, singing mocking and bawdy songs. On the way home, what Fourier calls "phanerogamie" is the order of the day; the impregnation of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls by their male age-mates is common. The open villages that supply the gang's contingent become Sodoms and Gomorrahs (note 174; EN [112]) and yield double the illegitimate-birth rate of the rest of the kingdom. What girls raised in this school achieve, as married women, in morality, was indicated earlier; their children, so far as opium does not finish them off first, are born recruits of the gang. This paragraph's one KEEP sentence (overwork-marches-and-demoralisation) and its two DROP clauses (open-villages-and-demoralisation; reproduction-of-gang-recruits) are all rendered above in full.

The gang in its classical form just described is called the public, common, or tramping gang. There are, namely, also private gangs. These are composed like the common gang but count fewer heads, and work, instead of under the gang-master, under some old farm-servant whom the farmer knows no better use for. The gipsy humour vanishes here, but by every testimony the payment and treatment of the children grow worse. This paragraph's four cuts (public-common-tramping-gang; private-gangs; private-gang-supervision; worse-payment-and-child-treatment) are all DROP and are all rendered above in full.

The gang system, which has been steadily expanding in recent years (note 175; EN [113]), plainly does not exist for the gang-master's own sake. It exists for the enrichment of the large farmers (note 176; EN [114]), respectively of the landlords (note 177; EN [115]). For the farmer there is no more ingenious method of keeping his labour force well below the normal level while always having the extra hand ready for all extra work, of extracting as much labour as possible with as little money as possible (note 178; EN [116]), and of making the adult male labourer "superfluous." From the foregoing account it will be understood why, on the one hand, greater or lesser unemployment of the countryman is admitted, while, on the other, the gang system is at the same time declared "necessary" on account of the want of male labour and its migration to the towns (note 179; EN [117]). The weed-clean field and the human weed of Lincolnshire, etc., are pole and counterpole of capitalist production (note 180; EN [118]) — DE gives the governing rent as "2 Pfd.St. bis 2 Pfd.St. 10 sh." per acre, EN as "40 to 50 shillings," neither converted into the other. This paragraph's two KEEP sentences (farmer-and-landlord-enrichment; cheap-labour-extraction-and-male-redundancy) and its three DROP clauses (gang-system-expansion; necessary-gangs-and-admitted-unemployment; capitalistic-production-poles) are all rendered above in full. Gang overwork throughout u86-c21 remains distinct from the Ch. 8 Normalarbeitstag; this closing image ends both Section 5e and the chapter, immediately ahead of the turn to primitive accumulation proper, which this unit's present-tense eviction, concentration, and drainage are not to be read as anticipating.

To close this section we must travel for a moment to Ireland. First, the facts that matter here. (DE and EN align one-to-one at this opening pid, en p1; no split or discrepancy.)

Ireland's population had grown to 8,222,664 by 1841; it shrank to 6,623,985 by 1851, to 5,850,309 by 1861, and to 5 1/5 million by 1866 (DE; EN gives 5½ millions, both retained without reconciliation) — roughly its 1801 level. The decline began with the famine year 1846, so that in less than twenty years Ireland lost more than 5/16 of its population (note 181; EN [119]). Its total emigration from May 1851 to July 1865 numbered 1,591,487; emigration during the last five years, 1861-1865, was more than half a million. The number of inhabited houses fell, from 1851 to 1861, by 52,990. From 1851 to 1861 the number of holdings of 15 to 30 acres grew by 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres by 109,000, while the total number of all farms fell by 120,000 — a fall due solely to the destruction of holdings under 15 acres, that is, to their centralisation.

The decrease in population was naturally accompanied, on the whole, by a decrease in the mass of products. For our purpose it suffices to consider the five years 1861-1865, during which more than half a million emigrated and the absolute population sank by more than 1/8 of a million (DE; EN gives more than 1/3 of a million, both retained without reconciliation) — see Table A. (EN instead places Table A immediately before this sentence, at its own p3, and reads forward from it, "From the above table it results," rather than pointing ahead to it as DE does; the reordering is preserved without repair.)

Table A — heading only; binding display carrier. (DE prints this heading as a separate row; EN carries no separate heading of its own here, folding the title directly into its own combined heading-and-data display at EN p3.)

The binding livestock display (Table A; DE prints it as two side-by-side panels, Horses-and-Cattle first, then Sheep-and-Pigs, while EN prints one combined table with all four categories per year; both layouts carry the same underlying data, with the discrepancies noted below): 1860, Horses 619,811, Cattle 3,606,374, Sheep 3,542,080, Pigs 1,271,072, no change columns for the baseline year. 1861, Horses 614,232 (−5,579), Cattle 3,471,688 (−134,686), Sheep 3,556,050 (+13,970), Pigs 1,102,042 (−169,030). 1862, Horses 602,894 (−11,338), Cattle 3,254,890 (−216,798), Sheep 3,456,132 (−99,918), Pigs 1,154,324 (+52,282). 1863, Horses 579,978 (−22,916), Cattle 3,144,231 (−110,659), Sheep 3,308,204 (DE −147,928; EN −147,982, both retained), Pigs 1,067,458 (−86,866). 1864, Horses 562,158 (−17,820), Cattle 3,262,294 (+118,063), Sheep 3,366,941 (DE +53,737; EN +58,737, both retained), Pigs 1,058,480 (−8,978). 1865, Horses DE 557,867 against EN 547,867 (both retained; −14,291), Cattle 3,493,414 (+231,120), Sheep 3,688,742 (+321,801), Pigs 1,299,893 (+241,413). (DE carries this data as its own separate table-heading row, p4, and body, p5; EN folds heading and body together into one combined display at its own p3, ahead of the text statement that in DE follows as p3.)

From the foregoing table it results: Horses, absolute decrease, 71,944. Cattle, absolute decrease, 112,960. Sheep, absolute increase, 146,662. Pigs, absolute increase, DE 28,821 against EN's malformed 28,8211, both retained as printed (note 182; EN [120]). Note 182/[120] adds that the result would look still worse further back: sheep numbered 3,694,294 in 1856 against 3,688,742 in 1865, and pigs numbered 1,409,883 in 1858 against 1,299,893 in 1865.

Let us now turn to agriculture, which supplies food for both livestock and people. In the following table, decrease or increase is calculated for each year against the one immediately before. The grain crop comprises wheat, oats, barley, rye, beans, and peas; the green crop comprises potatoes, turnips (DE glosses this loanword in brackets as <Futterrüben>, fodder-beet), mangold and beet-root, cabbage, yellow turnips, parsnips (DE glosses this loanword too, as <Pastinakwurzeln>), vetch, and so on.

Table B — heading only; binding display carrier. (DE prints the heading as a separate row; EN folds it directly into its own combined heading-and-data display at EN p7, alongside the table body that DE gives separately at the next row.)

The binding display retains DE's malformed title, "Zu- oder Abnahme des zum Fruchtbau und als Ware (resp.) Weide benutzten Bodenareals in Acres," against EN's "INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CROPS AND GRASS IN ACREAGE," without silently repairing Ware to Wiese: 1861, cereal crops decreased 15,701 acres, green crops decreased 36,974, grassland and clover decreased 47,969, flax increased 19,271, all land under tillage and stock-farming decreased 81,373. 1862: cereal −72,734; green crops −74,785; grassland and clover +6,623; flax +2,055; total −138,841. 1863: cereal −144,719; green crops −19,358; grassland and clover +7,724; flax +63,922; total −92,431. 1864: cereal −122,437; green crops −2,317; grassland and clover +47,486; flax +87,761; total +10,493. 1865: cereal −72,450; green crops, DE +25,421 against EN +25,241 (both retained); grassland and clover +68,970; flax −50,159; total, DE −28,218 against EN −28,398 (both retained). Total across 1861-65: cereal −428,041; green crops, DE −108,013 against EN −108,193; grassland and clover +82,834; flax, DE +122,850 against EN's malformed +122,8501; total, DE's own malformed −339.37 against EN −330,350 — every figure, and every malformation, retained as printed. (DE carries this data as a separate table-heading row at p8 and body at p9, this row; EN folds heading and body into one combined display at its own p7. DE omits a printed placeholder for cells with no movement that year; EN prints an explicit dash for each, which is how the column assignments above are fixed.)

In 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading "grassland," chiefly because the area under the heading "unused, waste land and bog (peat-moor)" decreased by 101,543 acres. Comparing 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in grain crops of 246,667 quarters, of which 48,999 were wheat, DE 166,605 were oats (EN gives 160,605, both retained — a genuine EN-side figure, confirmed against the MEW23 PDF scan), and 29,892 barley, and so on; a decrease in potatoes, although the area of their cultivation grew in 1865, of 446,398 tons, and so on. See Table C. (EN omits this closing cross-reference to Table C, which DE carries; the omission is preserved without repair. DE previously read "1854" here — a corpus defect fixed 2026-07-14, B23C-02, against the MEW23 PDF; DE and EN now agree on 1864.)

From the movement of Ireland's population and land-produce we pass to the movement in the purse of its landlords, larger tenants, and industrial capitalists. It is mirrored in the rise and fall of the income tax. For the following Table D it should be noted that Schedule D (profits, excluding tenant-farmers' profits) also takes in so-called "professional" profits, that is, the incomes of lawyers, doctors, and so on; while Schedules C and E, not separately itemised here, cover the incomes of officials, officers, state sinecurists, state creditors, and so on. (DE now presents Table D before Table C; EN instead gives this same lead-in, then Table C, then Table D — the two editions' table order is reversed and both orders are retained without reconciliation.)

Table D — heading only; binding display carrier. (DE prints this heading here, ahead of the income-tax data at the next row and ahead of Table C, which DE places afterward; EN instead reaches Table D only after Table C, folding this heading into its own combined display at EN p11.)

The binding income-tax display (Table D), for 1860 through 1865: Schedule A, rent of land — DE 12,893,829 against EN 13,893,829 (1860, both retained), 13,003,554, DE 13,308,938 against EN 13,398,938 (1862, both retained), 13,494,091, 13,470,700, 13,801,616. Schedule B, tenant-farmers' profits — 2,765,387, 2,773,644, 2,937,899, DE 2,938,823 against EN 2,938,923 (1863, both retained), 2,930,874, 2,946,072. Schedule D, industrial and other profits — 4,891,652, 4,836,203, 4,858,800, DE 4,858,800 against EN 4,846,497 (1863, both retained), 4,546,147, 4,850,199. All Schedules A through E together — 22,962,885, 22,998,394, 23,597,574, DE 23,597,574 against EN 23,658,631 (1863, both retained), 23,236,298, 23,930,340. (DE cites its source for this table as footnote 184, the Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, London 1866; EN instead prints the same citation inline within the table's own title, with no separate numbered footnote marker. DE carries the table heading separately at p12 and the body here; EN folds heading and body into its own single combined display, and reaches this table only after Table C, reversing DE's order.)

Table C — heading only; binding display carrier. (DE places this heading, and the whole of Table C, after Table D; EN instead reaches Table C first, before Table D, folding this heading into its own combined display at EN p10.)

Increase or decrease in the acreage of cultivated land, in product per acre, and in total product, 1865 compared with 1864 (note 183; EN [121]). Note 183/[121] states that this table's figures are compiled from the official "Agricultural Statistics, Ireland" publications for 1860 onward, laid before Parliament yearly; DE dates the relevant Dublin volume 1867, EN 1866, both retained without reconciliation. A 2nd-edition addendum to the same note further records that the 1872 official statistics showed a decrease in cultivated acreage of 134,915 acres compared with 1871, an increase in green-crop cultivation, decreases of 16,000 acres for wheat, 14,000 for oats, 4,000 for barley and rye, 66,632 for potatoes, 34,667 for flax, and 30,000 fewer acres in meadow, clover, vetch, and rape-seed; wheat acreage fell in round numbers from 285,000 in 1868 to 280,000 in 1869, 259,000 in 1870, and 244,000 in 1871, while EN [121] alone adds 1872, 228,000; and 1872 showed, in round numbers, an increase of 2,600 horses, 80,000 cattle, and DE 68,600 sheep against EN 68,609 sheep (both retained), with a decrease of 236,000 pigs.

Acres of cultivated land — stands alone as this display's first column label. EN carries no separate label row of its own here: its own combined Table C display, at EN p10, holds the label together with the full body of data that follows.

The binding acreage/yield/total-product display (Table C), acres of cultivated land, product per acre, and total product, 1864 against 1865, with the 1865 change: Wheat, 276,483 to 266,989 acres (−9,494), 13.3 to 13.0 cwt. per acre (−0.3), 875,782 to 826,783 quarters (−48,999). Oats, 1,814,886 to DE 1,735,228 acres against EN 1,745,228 acres (both retained; −69,658 either way), 12.1 to 12.3 cwt. per acre (+0.2), 7,826,332 to DE 7,659,272 quarters against EN 7,659,727 quarters (both retained; −166,605). Barley, 172,700 to 177,102 acres (+4,402), 15.9 to 14.9 cwt. per acre (−1.0), 761,909 to 732,017 quarters (−29,892). Bere, bracketed together with Rye under one shared acreage figure of 8,894 to 10,091 acres (+1,197), 16.4 to 14.8 cwt. per acre (−1.6), 15,160 to 13,989 quarters — DE prints no change figure for this row, while EN gives a decrease of 1,171 quarters. Rye, sharing Bere's acreage above, 8.5 to 10.4 cwt. per acre (+1.9), 12,680 to DE 18,364 quarters against EN 18,314 quarters (both retained; +5,684) — DE's own dump appends a stray figure, "1.171," directly after this row, evidently the Bere decrease misplaced across the row boundary, preserved here as printed rather than moved back to Bere. Potatoes, 1,039,724 to 1,066,260 acres (+26,536), 4.1 to 3.6 tons per acre (−0.5), 4,312,388 to DE 3,865,909 tons against EN 3,865,990 tons (both retained; −446,398). Turnips, 337,355 to 334,212 acres (−3,143), 10.3 to 9.9 tons per acre (−0.4), DE 3,467,569 tons against EN 3,467,659 tons, to 3,301,683 tons (both retained; −165,976). Mangold-wurzel, 14,073 to 14,389 acres (+316), 10.5 to 13.3 tons per acre (+2.8), 147,284 to 191,937 tons (+44,653). Cabbages, 31,821 to 33,622 acres (+1,801), 9.3 to 10.4 tons per acre (+1.1), 297,375 to 350,252 tons (+52,877). Flax, 301,693 to 251,433 acres (−50,260), 34.2 to 25.2 stones of 14 lb. per acre (−9.0), 64,506 to 39,561 stones (−24,945). Hay, 1,609,569 to 1,678,493 acres (DE gives the change as 68,924; EN prints the 1865 acreage cleanly as 1,678,493 but its change as the malformed 68,9241, retained against DE's clean 68,924), 1.6 to 1.8 tons per acre (+0.2), 2,607,153 to 3,068,707 tons (+461,554). (DE carries this table's heading at p14, its title at p15, and its acreage-column label at p16 as three separate rows before this body; EN folds all of that into one combined display at EN p10, which it reaches ahead of Table D rather than after it.)

Under Schedule D, the average annual increase of income from 1853 to 1864 was only 0.93 per cent, while over the same period in Great Britain it was 4.58 per cent. The following table shows the distribution of profits (excluding tenant-farmers' profits) for the years 1864 and 1865:

Table E — heading only; binding display carrier, introducing Schedule D income from profits (over £60) in Ireland. (DE prints this heading as its own row, with note 185 attached to the data that follows at the next row; EN folds heading and body together into one combined display at EN p13, where its own note [122] attaches.)

The binding profit-distribution display (Table E; note 185, EN [122], recording that the annual total income under Schedule D differs here from the preceding table because of certain deductions allowed by law), for 1864 and 1865: total yearly income of £4,368,610 divided among 17,467 persons in 1864, £4,669,979 among 18,081 persons in 1865. Yearly income over £60 and under £100: £238,726 among 5,015 persons in 1864, £222,575 among 4,703 persons in 1865. Of the yearly total income: £1,979,066 among 11,321 persons in 1864, £2,028,571 among 12,184 persons in 1865. Remainder of the yearly total income: £2,150,818 among 1,131 persons in 1864, £2,418,833 among 1,194 persons in 1865. Of these: £1,073,906 among 1,010 persons (1864), £1,097,927 among 1,044 persons (1865); £1,076,912 among 121 persons (1864), £1,320,906 among 150 persons (1865); £430,535 among 95 persons (1864), £584,458 among DE 122 persons against EN 2 persons (1865, both retained without reconciliation); £646,377 among 26 persons (1864), £736,448 among 28 persons (1865); £262,819 among 3 persons (1864), £274,528 among 3 persons (1865). (DE carries the table's heading separately at p19; EN folds heading and this full body into one combined display at EN p13.)

England, a country of developed capitalist production and preeminently industrial, would have bled to death from a population loss equal to Ireland's. But Ireland is at present only an agricultural district of England, fenced off by a wide channel, which supplies it with corn, wool, cattle, and industrial and military recruits.

Depopulation has thrown much land out of cultivation, has greatly diminished the produce of the soil (note 186; EN [123]), and, despite the expanded area devoted to cattle-breeding, has produced in some of its branches an absolute decrease, and in others an advance scarcely worth naming, constantly interrupted by setbacks. Note 186/[123] observes that if the product also diminishes relatively per acre, it must not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means of making up the soil's exhausted constituents. Nevertheless, ground-rents and tenant-farmers' profits kept rising continuously as the mass of the population fell, though the latter rose less steadily than the former. The reason is easily understood: on the one hand, the throwing-together of holdings and the conversion of arable land into pasture turned a larger part of the total product into surplus-product; the surplus-product grew, although the total product, of which it forms a fraction, decreased. On the other hand, the money value of this surplus-product rose even faster than its mass, owing to the English market prices for meat, wool, and the like rising over the last twenty and especially the last ten years.

Scattered means of production that serve the producers themselves as means of employment and subsistence, without valorising themselves through the incorporation of another's labour, are no more capital than a product consumed by its own producer is a commodity. If, along with the mass of the population, the mass of the means of production employed in agriculture also decreased, the mass of the capital employed in it increased, because a part of the formerly scattered means of production was turned into capital.

Ireland's total capital outside agriculture, invested in industry and trade, accumulated slowly over the last two decades and amid constant great fluctuation. The concentration of its individual component parts, however, developed all the more rapidly. Finally, however small its absolute growth, relative to the shrunken population it had swelled considerably.

Here, then, unfolds before our eyes, on a large scale, a process such as orthodox economy could not have wished more beautifully to prove its dogma that misery springs from absolute overpopulation and that equilibrium is restored through depopulation. This is a far more important experiment than the fourteenth-century plague so glorified by the Malthusians. Noted in passing: if it was in itself schoolmasterish and naive to apply the nineteenth century's conditions of production and population to the yardstick of the fourteenth, this naivety besides overlooked that, while that plague and the decimation accompanying it brought, on this side of the Channel, in England, liberation and enrichment of the rural population, on the other side, in France, greater servitude and increased misery followed close on its heels (note 186a; EN [124]: because Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the "principle of population," Th. Sadler, before publishing his own work on population, issued his famous book Ireland, its Evils and their Remedies, 2nd ed., London 1829, proving through comparison of the statistics of the individual provinces, and within each province of the individual counties, that misery there prevails not, as Malthus would have it, in proportion to population, but in inverse proportion to it).

The famine killed off more than a million people in Ireland in 1846, but only poor devils; it did the country's wealth not the slightest damage. The twenty-year exodus that followed, still swelling, did not, like the Thirty Years' War, decimate the means of production along with the people. Irish genius invented an entirely new method of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles from the scene of its misery. Emigrants settled in the United States send money home every year, travel-money for those left behind; every troop that emigrates this year draws another after it the next. Instead of costing Ireland anything, emigration thus forms one of the most lucrative branches of its export business. It is, finally, a systematic process which does not merely bore a temporary hole in the mass of the population, but pumps out of it every year more people than the births replace, so that the absolute level of the population sinks from year to year (note 186b; EN [125]: between 1851 and 1874 the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922).

What, then, were the consequences for Ireland's remaining workers, now freed of overpopulation? That the relative surplus-population is today as great as before 1846; that wages stand just as low and toil has increased; that misery in the countryside is again pressing toward a new crisis. The causes are simple: the revolution in agriculture kept pace with emigration; the production of the relative surplus-population kept more than pace with the absolute depopulation. A glance at DE 'Tabelle B' against EN 'table C' (both retained without reconciliation) shows how the conversion of arable land into pasture must work still more acutely in Ireland than in England: here, in England, green-crop cultivation grows with cattle-breeding; there, in Ireland, it declines. While large masses of formerly cultivated fields are left fallow or turned into permanent grassland, a large part of the previously unused waste land and peat bog serves for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller and medium tenants — counting among them all who cultivate no more than 100 acres — still make up about 8/10 of the total number. Note 186c says 94.6/5.4 per cent of the land ("des Bodens") is in holdings up to/over 100 acres; EN [126] instead says 94.6/5.4 per cent of the holdings fall below/above 100 acres, both retained without reconciliation. They are progressively crushed, to an altogether different degree than before, by the competition of capitalistically conducted agriculture, and therefore constantly supply the class of wage-labourers with new recruits. Ireland's one great industry, linen manufacture, needs relatively few adult men and, despite its expansion since cotton grew dearer in 1861-1866, employs altogether only a comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like every other great industry, it constantly produces, through incessant fluctuations within its own sphere, a relative surplus-population, even while the mass of people it absorbs grows absolutely. The misery of the rural population forms the pedestal of gigantic shirt factories, etc., whose army of workers is for the most part scattered over the flat countryside; here we meet again the previously described system of domestic work, whose methodical means of "making-supernumerary" are underpayment and overwork. Finally, though depopulation does not have such destructive consequences as in a country of developed capitalist production, it does not proceed without a constant reaction on the home market: the gap that emigration creates here narrows not only local demand for labour but also the incomes of small shopkeepers, artisans, and small tradespeople generally. Hence the decline of incomes between £60 and £100 in Table E.

A clear picture of the condition of Ireland's rural day-labourers is found in the reports of the Irish Poor-Law Inspectors, 1870 (note 186d, titling the report "on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Ireland," Dublin 1870, with a cross-reference to the "Agricultural Labourers (Ireland) Return," 8 March 1861; EN [127] instead titles the same report "...in Dublin," 1870, and adds "London, 1862" to the Return citation, all retained without reconciliation). Officials of a government sustained only by bayonets and by an open or veiled state of siege must all observe a restraint of language that their English colleagues scorn; nevertheless, they do not let their government indulge illusions. According to them, the still very low rural wage-rate has risen 50-60% over the last twenty years and now stands, on average, at 6-9 shillings a week. Behind this apparent rise, however, is hidden a real fall in wages, for it does not even make up for the meanwhile-occurred rise in the price of the necessary means of subsistence; proof is the following extract from the official accounts of an Irish workhouse.

Weekly average of the maintenance cost per head — heading only; binding display carrier. (DE prints this heading as a separate row, p29, ahead of the table body at p30; EN folds heading and body together into one combined display at EN p22.)

The binding weekly-maintenance-cost display: for the year ended 29 September 1849, provisions and necessaries 1sh.3¼d., clothing 3d., total 1sh.6¼d.; for the year ended 29 September 1869, provisions and necessaries 2sh.7¼d., clothing 6d., total 3sh.1¼d. (DE gives each row as a full date range, "29 Sept. 1848 bis 29 Sept. 1849" and "29 Sept. 1868 bis 29 Sept. 1869"; EN labels each row only by its closing date, "Year ended 29th Sept., 1849" and "Year ended 29th Sept., 1869" — the same underlying data, source-native labelling retained. DE carries this table's heading separately at p29 and the body here at p30; EN folds heading and body into one combined display at EN p22.)

The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore, DE says, "almost twice" (beinah zweimal) as high as twenty years before, against EN's "fully twice" — both retained without reconciliation; that of clothing is, in both editions, exactly twice as high.

Even apart from this disproportion, a bare comparison of the money-expressed wage-rate would still give no accurate result. Before the famine the great mass of rural wages was paid in kind, only the smallest part in money; today payment in money is the rule. From this alone it follows that, whatever the movement of the real wage, its money rate had to rise.

A quoted testimony (note 187) recalls: "Before the famine the agricultural day-labourer possessed a plot of land on which he grew potatoes and raised pigs and poultry. Nowadays he must not only buy all his food, he also loses the income from selling pigs, poultry, and eggs." EN's parallel quotation at EN p25 carries no footnote marker at this point — EN [128] exists in the footnote block but has no body marker and remains unattached; no host is invented — and it expands the same testimony with cabin and rood/half-acre/acre wording absent from DE: "Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin ... with a rood, or half-acre or acre of land, and facilities for ... a crop of potatoes. He was able to rear his pig and keep fowl.... But they now have to buy bread, and they have no refuse upon which they can feed a pig or fowl, and they have consequently no benefit from the sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs." Preserved as printed rather than backfilled into DE.

In fact, the land labourers formerly merged with the small tenants and mostly formed only the rearguard of the medium and large holdings on which they found employment. Only since the catastrophe of 1846 did they begin to form a fraction of the class of pure wage-labourers — a distinct estate connected to their wage-lords only by money relations.

Their housing condition in 1846 is known; since then it has worsened further. A part of the rural day-labourers, though shrinking day by day, still lives on the tenants' lands in overcrowded huts whose hideousness far exceeds the worst that the English rural districts showed us of this kind. And this holds generally, with the exception of some tracts of Ulster: in the south, in the counties of Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, etc.; in the east, Wicklow, Wexford, etc.; in the centre, King's and Queen's County, Dublin, etc.; in the north, Down, Antrim, Tyrone, etc.; in the west, Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, etc. "It is," one of the inspectors cries out, "it is a disgrace to the religion and civilization of this country" (note 187a; EN [129] renders this "a disgrace to the Christianity and to the civilisation of this country"). To make the day-labourers' hovels more tolerable to live in, the little plots of land attached to them from time immemorial are systematically confiscated. (DE carries this whole passage as one paragraph, p35, with note 187a attached at its close; EN splits it into three rows — EN p27 the housing description, EN p28 the inspector's cry, carrying [129], and EN p29 the confiscation sentence — with the note attached only at EN p28, not at EN p27 or p29. Both note-placement patterns are retained without reconciliation.)

The same quoted inspector (note 187a again — DE reuses the same note number for this second quotation, while EN instead attaches a separate marker, [130], to its parallel row, EN p30) states: "The consciousness of this kind of ban into which they are put by the landlords and their agents has produced in the rural day-labourers corresponding feelings of antagonism and hatred against those who treat them as a rechtlose Race" — a lawless race; EN renders the same phrase "a proscribed race."

The first act of the agricultural revolution was, on the very largest scale and as if by a watchword given from above, to sweep away the huts situated on the field of labour. Many workers were thereby forced to seek shelter in villages and towns; there they were thrown, like refuse, into garrets, holes, cellars, and the worst-quarter slums. Thousands of Irish families who, even by the testimony of nationally-prejudiced Englishmen, were distinguished by their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, their carefree cheerfulness, and their domestic moral purity, found themselves suddenly transplanted into the hothouses of vice. The men must now seek work with neighbouring tenant-farmers and are hired only by the day — that is, in the most precarious form of wage; besides which — (EN closes its parallel row, EN p31, on the single word "Hence"; the sentence continues, in both editions, into the next quoted row.)

Continuing the quoted testimony (note 187b; EN [131]): they now have long distances to go to the tenancy and back, often wet as rats and exposed to other hardships that frequently produce weakness, illness, and consequent want.

Further quoted testimony reports: "The towns had to absorb, year after year, what counted as surplus labour in the country districts" (note 187c; EN [132]), and then it is wondered "that in the towns and villages there is surplus, and in the countryside a want of labourers!" (DE's raw marker "(187d)" is split across source lines 3359-3360; the logged normalization attaches its existing note text "p. 26.". EN body instead reads "there is still a surplus of labour in the towns and villages, and either a scarcity or a threatened scarcity in some of the country divisions," while EN [133] itself cites "l. c., p. 25."; both page citations remain unreconciled). The truth is that this want becomes felt only "at the time of urgent agricultural work, in spring and autumn, while during the rest of the year many hands remain idle" (note 187e; EN [134]); that "after harvest, from October to spring, there is scarcely any employment for them" (note 187f; EN [135]); and that even during the busy time they are also "frequently losing whole days and exposed to interruptions of work of every kind" (note 187g; EN [136]).

These consequences of the agricultural revolution — that is, of the conversion of arable land into pasture, the application of machinery, the strictest economy of labour, and the like — are further sharpened by the "model landlords": those who, instead of consuming their rents abroad, are gracious enough to live in Ireland on their own estates. So that the law of supply and demand may remain wholly unoffended, these gentlemen draw — (the sentence continues, in both editions, into the next quoted row; EN closes its parallel row, EN p34, on "these gentlemen draw their.")

Quoted testimony, continuing directly from the sentence begun in the previous row (note 187h; EN [137]): "...now almost their whole labour-supply from their small tenants, who are thus obliged to attend, when required, to the landlord's work, at wages generally lower than those paid to the ordinary day-labourer, and that without any regard to the inconvenience and loss arising from their having to neglect their own fields at the critical time of sowing or harvest." (EN opens its own version of this same clause with an ellipsis, "labour-supply ... chiefly from their small tenants," marking the same continuation from the row before; both editions attach their note here.)

The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the frequent recurrence and long duration of stoppages of work — all these symptoms of a relative surplus-population figure, then, in the reports of the Poor-Law inspectors as so many grievances of the Irish agricultural proletariat. It will be remembered that we met similar phenomena among the English rural proletariat. But the difference is that in England, an industrial country, the industrial reserve recruits itself from the countryside, while in Ireland, an agricultural country, the agricultural reserve recruits itself in the towns, the refuges of the expelled rural labourers. There, the supernumeraries of agriculture are transformed into factory workers; here, those driven into the towns remain agricultural labourers, even while they press at the same time on the urban wage, and are constantly sent back to the countryside in search of work.

The official reporters sum up the material condition of the agricultural day-labourers as follows:

"Though living with the utmost frugality, their wage barely suffices to provide food and housing for themselves and their families; for clothing they need further income ... The atmosphere of their dwellings, together with other privations, exposes this class in a quite particular degree to typhus and consumption." (Note 187i. EN [138] casts the opening clause in the singular instead — "his own wages are barely sufficient to provide food for an ordinary family and pay his rent," continuing in its own words, "and he depends upon other sources for the means of clothing himself, his wife, and children" — rather than DE's single ellipsis-joined quotation; both phrasings retained as printed.)

After this it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of the reporters, a gloomy discontent runs through the ranks of this class; that they long for the past, loathe the present, despair of the future, "give themselves up to the reprehensible influences of demagogues," and have only the one fixed idea of emigrating to America. This is the land of Cockaigne into which the great Malthusian universal panacea, depopulation, has transformed green Erin (DE glosses "Erin" in brackets as <alte Bezeichnung für Irland>, "the old name for Ireland"; EN carries no equivalent gloss).

What a comfortable life the Irish manufacturing workers lead, one example will suffice to show:

"On my recent inspection of the north of Ireland," says the English factory inspector Robert Baker, "I was struck by the effort of a skilled Irish worker to secure his children's education from the most meagre means; I give his statement verbatim, as I took it from his own mouth. That he is a skilled factory hand is shown by his being employed on goods for the Manchester market. Johnson: I am a beetler" (DE glosses this loanword in brackets as <Appreteur>; EN leaves it unglossed) "and work from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, Monday to Friday; on Saturday we leave off at 6 in the evening and have three hours for meals and rest. I have five children. For this work I get 10s. 6d. a week; my wife works too and earns 5s. a week. The eldest girl, twelve years old, minds the house; she is our cook and only helper, and gets the younger ones ready for school. My wife gets up and goes out with me. A girl passing our house wakes me at half past five in the morning. We eat nothing before we go to work. The twelve-year-old looks after the little ones through the day. We breakfast at eight and go home for it. We have tea once a week; otherwise we have stirabout, sometimes of oatmeal, sometimes of Indian meal, according to what we can get. In winter we have a little sugar and water with our Indian meal. In summer we grow a few potatoes on a small patch of ground ourselves, and when they are done we go back to stirabout." (EN alone adds here, "Sometimes we get a little milk as it may be," a sentence absent from DE and retained as printed.) "So it goes, day in, day out, Sunday and weekday, the whole year round. I am always very tired in the evening after the day's work. We see a bit of meat only rarely, as an exception. Three of our children go to school, for which we pay 1d. a head weekly. Our house rent is 9d. a week; peat and firing cost at least 1s. 6d. a fortnight." (Note 188; EN [139].)

These are Irish wages, this is Irish life!

In fact, the misery of Ireland is again the topic of the day in England. At the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867 one of the Irish land magnates, Lord Dufferin, set about its solution in The Times: "How humane of so great a lord!" (Both editions retain this exclamation in Marx's own German, unrendered into English even within the Moore-Aveling text.)

From Table E it was seen that in 1864, of £4,368,610 total profit, 3 "plus-makers" pocketed only £262,819, while in 1865, out of £4,669,979 total profit, the same 3 virtuosi of "abstinence" pocketed £274,528; 1864: 26 plus-makers, £646,377; 1865: 28 plus-makers, £736,448; 1864: 121 plus-makers, DE's malformed £1.0769.12 against EN's £1,076,912; 1865: 150 plus-makers, £1,320,906; 1864: 1,131 plus-makers, £2,150,818, nearly half the annual total profit; 1865: 1,194 plus-makers, £2,418,833, more than half the annual total profit. But the lion's share that a vanishingly small number of land magnates in England, Scotland, and Ireland swallows from the yearly national rental is so monstrous that English state wisdom finds it fitting not to supply the same statistical material for the distribution of ground-rent as for the distribution of profit. Lord Dufferin is one of these land magnates. That rent-rolls and profits could ever be "excessive," or that their plethora is connected in any way with the plethora of the people's misery, is of course as "disreputable" a notion as it is "unsound" — he sticks to facts. The fact is that as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish rent-rolls swell; that depopulation "does good" to the landowner, and hence also to the land, and hence also to the people, who are but an appendage of the soil. He declares, accordingly, that Ireland is still overpopulated and the stream of emigration still flows too sluggishly; to be completely happy, Ireland must let go at least a further third of a million working people. Let no one imagine that this, moreover poetic, lord is a physician of Sangrado's school, who, whenever he did not find his patient better, prescribed bloodletting, and then fresh bloodletting, until the patient lost his sickness along with his blood: Lord Dufferin demands a fresh bloodletting of only a third of a million, instead of about two million, without whose release the millennium in Erin is in fact not to be had. The proof is easily supplied.

The binding holdings display (Table: Number and Extent of Farms in Ireland, 1864; note 188a, EN [140]) gives, by category, the number of holdings and their acreage: not over 1 acre, DE 40,653 against EN 48,653 holdings, 25,394 acres (both editions agree on the acreage). Over 1, not over 5 acres: 82,037 holdings, 288,916 acres. Over 5, not over 15 acres: 176,368 holdings, 1,836,310 acres. Over 15, not over 30 acres: 136,578 holdings, 3,051,343 acres. Over 30, not over 50 acres: 71,961 holdings, 2,906,274 acres. Over 50, not over 100 acres: DE 54,347 against EN 54,247 holdings, 3,983,880 acres (again agreeing on acreage). Over 100 acres: 31,927 holdings, DE 8,277,807 against EN 8,227,807 acres. Total area: DE 20,319,924 against EN 26,319,924 acres — every count, acreage, and total retained exactly as printed in each edition, without reconciliation. (Note 188a/[140] states that the total area also includes bog and waste land.)

Centralisation destroyed, mainly from 1851 to 1861, holdings of the first three categories, under 1 and not over 15 acres; these above all must disappear. This gives 307,058 "supernumerary" tenants, and, reckoning the family at the low average of 4 heads, 1,228,232 persons. Under the extravagant assumption that a quarter of these could be reabsorbed once the agricultural revolution is complete, 921,174 persons remain to emigrate. Categories 4, 5, and 6, of over 15 and not over 100 acres, are, as has long been known in England, too small for capitalist grain-growing, and for sheep-farming almost vanishing quantities. Under the same assumptions as before, a further 788,761 persons must therefore emigrate: sum, 1,709,532. And — DE "comme l'appétit vient en mangeant," glossed in brackets as <da der Appetit beim Essen kommt>, "since appetite comes with eating," against EN's unglossed "as l'appétit vient en mangeant" — the eyes of the rent-roll will soon discover that Ireland, with DE "3 1/2 Millionen" against EN "3½ millions," is still always miserable, and miserable because she is overpopulated; therefore her depopulation must go yet further, so that she may fulfil her true calling, that of an English sheep-walk and cattle-pasture. (Note 188b/[141]: how the famine and its consequences were systematically exploited, by individual landowners and by English legislation alike, to force through the agricultural revolution and thin Ireland's population to the measure that suited the landlords, is treated more fully in Book III, in the section on landed property, where Marx also returns to the condition of the small tenants and agricultural labourers; here only one citation, from Nassau W. Senior's posthumous "Journals, Conversations and Essays relating to Ireland," quoting a "Dr. G." on the Poor Law and emigration as instruments for the landlords' victory, and on the English Corn Laws of 1815 and their 1846 repeal as a further spur to the conversion of Irish arable into pasture, the concentration of holdings, and the eviction of small cultivators — a spur, the note adds, that English agronomists, economists, and politicians followed by discovering the Irish soil fit only for forage, a claim Léonce de Lavergne hastened to repeat across the Channel.)

This profitable method has, like everything good in this world, its drawback: the accumulation of ground-rent in Ireland keeps pace with the accumulation of Irishmen in America. The Irishman driven out by sheep and ox rises again, on the other side of the ocean, as DE "Fenier" against EN "Fenian" — both source-native spellings retained; and, facing the old queen of the seas, the young giant republic rises up, ever more threatening.

Acerba fata Romanos agunt (both editions carry this Latin line unrendered).

Scelusque fraternae necis. (Both editions carry this second Latin line unrendered.)

The supplied gloss of the Latin close: DE gives it as one bracketed German line, <Hartes Schicksal plagt die Römer und das Verbrechen des Brudermords> — "harsh fate plagues the Romans, and the crime of fratricide." EN instead splits the same gloss into two bracketed English lines, "[A cruel fate torments the Romans," and "and the crime of fratricide]" — one supplied translation becoming two English rows, without adding or dropping content.