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thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the
government and the nation – as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers,
to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven –
the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all
kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.
At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private
speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they
received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence the accumulation of the
national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stock of these banks,
whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of
England began with lending its money to the Government at 8%; at the same time it was
empowered by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again to the public
in the form of banknotes. It was allowed to use these notes for discounting bills, making advances
on commodities, and for buying the precious metals. It was not long ere this credit-money, made
by the bank itself, became the coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to the State, and
paid, on account of the State, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave
with one hand and took back more with the other; it remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal
creditor of the nation down to the last shilling advanced. Gradually it became inevitably the
receptacle of the metallic hoard of the country, and the centre of gravity of all commercial credit.
What effect was produced on their contemporaries by the sudden uprising of this brood of
bankocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, stock-jobbers, &c., is proved by the writings of that time,
e.g., by Bolingbroke’s.
8
With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the
sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian
thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice
in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the
beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased
to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business,
therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its
great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A
great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was
yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.
As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue, which must cover the yearly
payments for interest, &c., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the
system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses,
without the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence, increased
taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulation of debts contracted
one after another, compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for new
extraordinary expenses. Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary
means of subsistence (thereby increasing their price), thus contains within itself the germ of
automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an incident, but rather a principle. In Holland,
therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot, DeWitt, has in his “Maxims”
extolled it as the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and
overburdened with labour. The destructive influence that it exercises on the condition of the wage
labourer concerns us less however, here, than the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of
peasants, artisans, and in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not two
opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy is still further
heightened by the system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts.
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The great part that the public debt, and the fiscal system corresponding with it, has played in the
capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett,
Doubleday and others, to seek in this, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the
modern peoples.
The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of
expropriating independent labourers, of capitalising the national means of production and
subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of
production. The European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention, and,
once entered into the service of the surplus-value makers, did not merely lay under contribution in
the pursuit of this purpose their own people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through
export premiums. They also forcibly rooted out, in their dependent countries, all industry, as, e.g.,
England did. with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the continent of Europe, after Colbert’s
example, the process was much simplified. The primitive industrial capital, here, came in part
directly out of the state treasury. “Why,” cries Mirabeau, “why go so far to seek the cause of the
manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? 180,000,000 of debts contracted by the
sovereigns!”
9
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of
the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The
birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the
factories were recruited by means of the press-gang. Blasé as Sir F. M. Eden is as to the horrors
of the expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil, from the last third of the 15th
century to his own time; with all the self-satisfaction with which he rejoices in this process,
“essential” for establishing capitalistic agriculture and “the due proportion between arable and
pasture land” – he does not show, however, the same economic insight in respect to the necessity
of child-stealing and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing exploitation into
factory exploitation, and the establishment of the “true relation” between capital and labour-
power. He says:
“It may, perhaps, be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any
manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages
and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be
employed by turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest
which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that
numbers of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected
together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead to
profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national
felicity?”
10
“In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly in
Lancashire,” says Fielden, “the newly-invented machinery was used in large
factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel.
Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from towns;
and Lancashire, in particular, being, till then, comparatively thinly populated and
barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small and nimble fingers of
little children being by very far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up
of procuring apprentices from the different parish workhouses of London,
Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these little, hapless
creatures were sent down into the north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13
or 14 years old. The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to
feed and lodge them in an “apprentice house” near the factory; overseers were