Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/9

 collection of the miseries of the laboring class, but an exposition of the historical tendencies of the time, especially of the capitalistic manner of production in so far as it pertains to the condition of the laboring class.

Engels saw in misery not merely the misery, as did the socialists of his time, but the germ of a higher form of society which it bore in its bosom. We who have grown up in the circle of modern socialistic thought can scarcely realize what a task was accomplished by the twenty-four-year-old Engels in his book, at a time when the miseries of the working class were either denied or bemoaned, but were never viewed as a portion of historical development.

The shallow, fantastic, literary and academic world of our time, which studies socialism less in the works of its scientific defenders than in the police reports, found nothing in the "Condition" that suited its purposes except the prophecy of an early outbreak of an English revolution, and with much satisfaction pointed out the non-fulfillment of this prophecy. These gentlemen forgot that since 1844 England has in fact gone through a colossal revolution, which had already begun in 1846 with the abolition of the "Com Laws," followed in 1847 by the fixing of a normal working day for women and children at ten hours, and that from then on concession after concession was granted to the laboring classes in England, so that to-day the objects of the Chartists are practically secured, and they have now conquered the balance of political power. Events which no one could have foreseen were at fault that the prophecy was not fulfilled; above all the June fight of 1848 in Paris and the discovery of the gold fields of California in the same year, which drew across the sea the discontented elements of England and weakened for a time the strength of the labor movement.

It is not so remarkable that this prophecy was not literally fulfilled as that so many other prophecies of the book were fulfilled.

Of the other side of the "Condition" our literary men said little, though it was of especial significance for German political economy. In the theoretical field German political economy had never accomplished anything. Marx has explained the reason for this in his "Capital." Their only productions worthy of mention are a number of descriptions of the conditions of certain classes of labor in certain localities, such as those furnished by Thun, Schnapper-Arndt, Braf, Sax, Singer, Herkner and others. So far as these