CAPITAL AND LABOUR. 661 



At first its tone was moderate and its demands reason- 

 able; but it became fired with the revolutionary spirit that 

 animated almost all Europe at that time, until its very name 

 became synonymous with socialism and tyranny of the worst 

 kind. 



In ten years it had burnt itself to ashes with the fire of its 

 own internal dissensions, and was unable ever to rise again 

 from its own ruin. 



Yet, agitation of a more or less violent kind has continued 

 ever since. Mr. Walter Besant, in his book " A 11 Sorts and 

 Conditions of Men," satirises the attitude of labour, in an 

 account of a meeting at the East End, at which a violent 

 speaker, who demands the abolition of everything, is cheered 

 to the echo as representative of the feeling of the meeting, 

 and indicative of the one remedy that would be acceptable 

 to the world of labour at large. For years the democratic 

 organs in England have urged that the people should not 

 be content with a few representatives in Parliament, but 

 should, by united effort, place in the House of Commons a 

 power that would be great enough to control the destinies 

 of the country, and that would force legislation of so drastic 

 a character to be directed against their arch-enemy. Capital, 

 that its head should for ever be put under the heel of Labour. 

 The spirit animatmg labour found its strongest expression in 

 the celebrated Communist Manifesto, which concludes by 

 saying " The working classes have nothing to lose but their 

 chains. They have the world to win." 



The conclusion of some socialistic addresses by K. Marx, 

 the German sociahst, is of a sort calculated to deepen the 

 feeling of unthinking readers against the present condition 

 of things. He says : — " Capital is the most terrible scourge 

 of humanity : it fattens on the misery of the poor, the 

 degradation of the worker, and the brutalising toil of his 

 wife and children. Just as capital grows, so grow also 

 pauperism, — that millstone round the neck of civilization, — 

 the revolting cruelties of our factory system, the squalor of 

 great cities, and the presence of deep poverty, seated hard by 

 the gates of enormous wealth." 



Professor Huxley, in some able articles in "The Nine- 

 teenth Century," has demonstrated that, so far from being 

 actually antagonistic, capital and labour are mutually de- 

 pendent on each other, — are, in fact, so circumstanced that 

 neither can live without the other ; but the working classes 

 do not read "The Nineteenth Century," and, if we may 



