class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively
comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model
working-men of Messrs. Leone Levi & Giffen, and they are very nice
people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in
particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.

"But as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and
insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The
East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and
desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical
and moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns--abstraction
made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller
towns and in the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the
_value_ of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of
subsistence, and the other law which reduces its _average price_, as a
rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws act
upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which
crushes them between its wheels.

"This, then, was the position created by the Free Trade policy of
1847, and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing
capitalists. But, then, a change came. The crash of 1866 was,
indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that
did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the
time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a
chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry.
Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for
prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A
dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is
what we have been living in for nearly ten years. How is this?