Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/216

 APPENDIX 209

Cheap food, high wages, for this alone the English Free Traders have spent millions, and their enthusiasm has already infected their continental brethren. And, generally speaking, all those who advocate Free Trade do so in the interests of the working class.

But, strange to say,.the people for whom cheap food is to be procured at all costs are very ungrateful. Cheap food has as bad a repute in England as cheap government has in France. The people see in these self-sacrificing gentlemen, in Bowring, Bright and Co., their worst enemies and the most shameless hypocrites.

Everyone knows that in England the struggle between Liberals and Democrats takes the name of the struggle between Free Traders and Chartists. Let us see how the English Free Traders have proved to the people the good intentions that animate them.

This is what they said to the factory hands—

“The duty on corn is a tax upon wages; this tax you pay to the landlords, those medizeval aristocrats ; if your position is a wretched one, it is so only on account of the high price of the most indispensable articles of food.”

The workers in turn asked of the manufacturers,—

“Flow is it that in the course of the last thirty years, while our commerce and manufacture has immensely in- creased, our wages have fallen far more rapidly, in pro- portion, than the price of corn has gone up?

“The tax which you say we pay the landlords is scarcely threepence a week per worker. And yet the wages of the hand-loom weaver fell, between 1815 and 1843, from 28s. per week to 5s., and the wages of the power-loom weavers, between 1823 and 1843, from 20s. per week to 8s.

“And during the whole of the time that portion of the tax which you say we pay the landlord has never