This appropriation of surplus labour is a very old phenomenon in human society. In all the forms of society which depended on slave-labour, and under the feudal _régime_, the appropriation of the results of other men’s labour was open, undisguised, and compulsory. Under the capitalistic system it is disguised under the form of free contract. The effect is the same. For the workman who is unprovided with the instruments of labour, whose working power is useless without them, this compulsion is not less real because it is concealed under the forms of freedom. He must agree to this free contract or starve. It is the surplus value thus obtained which the capitalist seeks to accumulate by all the methods available. These methods are described by Marx with great detail and elaboration through several hundred pages of his first volume. His account, supported at every step by long and copious citations from the best historical authorities and from the blue-books of the various parliamentary commissions, is a lurid and ghastly picture of the many abuses of English industrialism. It is the dark and gloomy reverse of the industrial glories of England. The fearful prolongation of the hours of labour, the merciless exploitation of women and of children from the age of infancy, the utter neglect of sanitary conditions—whatever could lessen the costs of production and swell the profits of the capitalist, though every law of man and nature were violated in the process; such are the historical facts which Marx emphasises and illustrates with an overwhelming force of evidence. They receive ample confirmation in the history of the English Factory Acts, imposed on greedy and unscrupulous capitalists after a severe struggle prolonged for half a century, and required to prevent the moral and physical ruin of the industrial population. We must now consider the process of the development of capitalism rather more closely.[4] Under the old system industry was carried on by the individual. There could be no doubt as to the ownership of the product, as he produced it by his own labour, with materials and tools that belonged to himself. Such was the normal method of production in those days. It is very different in the existing system. The most conspicuous result of the capitalistic system is, that production is a social operation carried on by men organised and associated in factories; but the product is appropriated by individual capitalists: it is social production and capitalistic appropriation. Whereas the property of the preceding era rested on the individual’s own labour, property under the capitalistic system is the product of other men’s labour. This is the contradiction which runs through the entire history of capitalism. Here we have in germ all the antagonism and confusion of the present time. The incompatibility of social production and capitalistic appropriation must more and more declare itself as the supremacy of the system extends over the world.