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appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the
utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could
exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence. ... In many of the manufacturing
districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong
[Lancashire], cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the
unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of
master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of
labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of
cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their
work and ... even in some instances ... were driven to commit suicide.... The
beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire,
secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many
a murder. The profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the
appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse
to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any possibility
of limit; they began the practice of what is termed “night-working,” that is, having
tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the day, they had another set
ready to go on working throughout the night; the day-set getting into the beds that
the night-set had just quitted, and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the
beds that the day-set quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in
Lancashire, that the beds never get cold.”
11
With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public
opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged
cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the
naïve Annals of Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of
English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the
Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on
between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well.
England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes
yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed
fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. And, even to the present
day, Liverpool “respectability” is the Pindar of the slave trade which – compare the work of
Aikin [1795] already quoted – “has coincided with that spirit of bold adventure which has
characterised the trade of Liverpool and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has
occasioned vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand for the
manufactures of the country” (p. 339). Liverpool employed in the slave-trade, in 1730, 15 ships;
in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792, 132.
12
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a
stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of
commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its
pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to
complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at
one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the
mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of
modern society.
13
If money, according to Augier,
14
“comes into the world with a congenital
blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood
and dirt.
15
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Chapter 31
2
“The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted.” Lond., 1832, pp. 98-99. Author of the
anonymous work: “Th. Hodgskin.”
3
Even as late as 1794, the small cloth-makers of Leeds sent a deputation to Parliament, with a petition
for a law to forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. (Dr. Aikin, l. c.)
4
William Howitt: “Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives
by the Europeans in all their Colonies.” London, 1838, p. 9. On the treatment of the slaves there is a
good compilation in Charles Comte, “Traité de la Législation.” 3me éd. Bruxelles, 1837. This subject
one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it
can, without restraint, model the world after its own image.
5
Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut-Gov. of that island: “The History of Java,” Lond., 1817.
6
In the year 1866 more than a million Hindus died of hunger in the province of Orissa alone.
Nevertheless, the attempt was made to enrich the Indian treasury by the price at which the necessaries
of life were sold to the starving people.
7
William Cobbett remarks that in England all public institutions are designated “royal”; as
compensation for this, however, there is the “national” debt.
8
“Si les Tartares inondaient l’Europe aujourd’hui, il faudrait bien des affaires pour leur faire entendre
ce que c’est qu’un financier parmi nous.” [if the Tartars were to flood into Europe today, it would be a
difficult job to make them understand what a financier is with us] Montesquieu, “Esprit des lois,” t.
iv., p. 33, ed. Londres, 1769.
9
Mirabeau, l. c., t. vi., p. 101.
10
Eden, l. c., Vol. I., Book II., Ch. 1., p. 421.
11
John Fielden, l. c., pp. 5, 6. On the earlier infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), l. c.,
p. 219. and Gisborne: “Enquiry into the Duties of Men,” 1795 Vol. II.
When the steam-engine
transplanted the factories from the country waterfalls to the middle of towns, the “abstemious”
surplus-value maker found the child-material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek slaves
from the workhouses. When Sir R. Peel (father of the “minister of plausibility"), brought in his bill for
the protection of children, in 1815, Francis Homer, lumen of the Billion Committee and intimate
friend of Ricardo, said in the House of Commons: “It is notorious, that with a bankrupt’s effects, a
gang, if he might use the word, of these children had been put up to sale, and were advertised publicly
as part of the property. A most atrocious instance had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench
two years before, in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one
manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some benevolent persons in a
state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible had come to his knowledge while on a
[Parliamentary] Committee ... that not many years ago, an agreement had been made between a
London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every 20 sound
children one idiot should be taken.”
12
In 1790, there were in the English West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen
for one, in the Dutch twenty-three for one. (Henry Brougham: “An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of
the European Powers.” Edin. 1803, vol. II., p. 74.)
13
The phrase, “labouring poor,” is found in English legislation from the moment when the class of
wage labourers becomes noticeable. This term is used in
opposition, on the one hand, to the “idle
poor,” beggars, etc., on the. out and out vulgar bourgeois. “The laws of commerce are the laws of
Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke, l. c., pp. 31, 32.) No wonder that, true to the laws
of God and of Nature, he always sold himself in the best market. A very good portrait of this Edmund
Burke, during his liberal time, is to be found in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Tucker. Tucker was a
parson and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent political economist. In face of
the infamous cowardice of character that reigns today, and believes most devoutly in “the laws of