Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/40

 starvation and intolerable misery, owing to the displacement of the old methods and the competition of the labour of women and children with that of grown men.

During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century also the people, as we have seen, were on the whole better off, their wages would buy them more and better food and raiment than for two centuries before. Consequently the pressure being sudden was more severely felt and more vigorously resisted than it is to-day. The workers saw that the unregulated introduction of machines meant for them ruin; as Sir James Steuart, the famous economist, plainly stated it must, ten years before the publication of "The Wealth of Nations." They, therefore, in the first place attacked the machines themselves; and bands of workpeople under the name of Luddites destroyed machinery in many industrial centres, with the impression that thus they were striking heavy blows at the real enemy. As a matter of course their adversaries were not the inert machines, which only produced more wealth at the cost of less and less expenditure of human labour, but the class appropriation of these improvements which gave to the labourers, owing to competition among themselves for employment, a less and less proportionate share of the wealth created.

For the cheapening of the products did not benefit the workers as a class. It only enabled them to take a lower average wage in times of pressure without absolute starvation; whilst the uncertainty arising from constant improvements and the competition of their own families rendered their position even worse than the mere amount of wages for long hours and excessive