The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892Engels, Friedrich
History
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892
Engels, Friedrich
Great Britain -- Economic conditions; Working class -- Great Britain
With the Irish, feeling and passion predominate; reason must bow before
them. Their sensuous, excitable nature prevents reflection and quiet,
persevering activity from reaching development--such a nation is utterly
unfit for manufacture as now conducted. Hence they held fast to
agriculture, and remained upon the lowest plane even of that. With the
small subdivisions of land, which were not here artificially created, as
in France and on the Rhine, by the division of great estates, but have
existed from time immemorial, an improvement of the soil by the
investment of capital was not to be thought of; and it would, according
to Alison, require 120 million pounds sterling to bring the soil up to
the not very high state of fertility already attained in England. The
English immigration, which might have raised the standard of Irish
civilisation, has contented itself with the most brutal plundering of the
Irish people; and while the Irish, by their immigration into England,
have furnished England a leaven which will produce its own results in the
future, they have little for which to be thankful to the English
immigration.
The attempts of the Irish to save themselves from their present ruin, on
the one hand, take the form of crimes. These are the order of the day in
the agricultural districts, and are nearly always directed against the
most immediate enemies, the landlord's agents, or their obedient
servants, the Protestant intruders, whose large farms are made up of the
potato patches of hundreds of ejected families. Such crimes are
especially frequent in the South and West. On the other hand, the Irish
hope for relief by means of the agitation for the repeal of the
Legislative Union with England. From all the foregoing, it is clear that
the uneducated Irish must see in the English their worst enemies; and
their first hope of improvement in the conquest of national independence.
But quite as clear is it, too, that Irish distress cannot be removed by
any Act of Repeal. Such an Act would, however, at once lay bare the fact
that the cause of Irish misery, which now seems to come from abroad, is
really to be found at home. Meanwhile, it is an open question whether
the accomplishment of repeal will be necessary to make this clear to the
Irish. Hitherto, neither Chartism nor Socialism has had marked success
in Ireland.
I close my observations upon Ireland at this point the more readily, as
the Repeal Agitation of 1843 and O'Connell's trial have been the means of
making the Irish distress more and more known in Germany.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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