Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/67

Rh Workingmen and Workingwomen:

HE beginning of the last half of the nineteenth century witnessed in the principal European countries and also the United States an unparalleled growth and development in the capitalist system of production. It was the period in which the gigantic cotton industry in the North of England was unable to procure enough human flesh for absorption and transmutation into surplus value; it was the period in which the northern part of the Western Hemisphere was ravaged by a gigantic civil war, waged to decide the question whether the semi-feudal Southern aristocracy or the, comparatively speaking, progressive and impatient capitalist class of the industrial North should henceforth dictate the political policy and economic and social course of the Union; it was the period in which the gradually awakening Muscovite Empire, through the at least nominal emancipation of the serfs, created its first large armies of modern industrial and agrarian proletarians, and thereby proclaimed to the world the definite collapse of feudalism and the ascendancy of capitalism in Russia; it was the period in which the question of political and economic unity was becoming an ever greater problem and necessity to the general progress of the German States, and also the crying demand of the hour in torn and disunited Italy; in other words: it was the period in which the national units of capitalist production became conscious of their interests, and also began to look with envy upon the colonial possessions and the consequent imperialistic domination of England; it was the beginning of the great battle of capitalist national units for international supremacy—a struggle whose culmination is vividly illustrated by the present Great War. In the sixties and seventies of the last century, of course, the indications for a large era of imperialism were as yet only mildly perceivable. As stated before, countries like Germany, the United States and France were still occupied