In the principal states of Europe and America, in our colonies generally, and indeed in most modern countries called “civilized,” wages-slavery is the normal condition of the labouring classes. This latter kind of slavery is, _cæteris paribus_, more or less intensely severe according to the degree of perfection to which civilization is carried. Thus, in our United Kingdom, which is accounted the most civilized country in the world, wages-slavery is attended with greater hardships, and subject to more privations and casualties, than anywhere else. Nowhere else do we find employment so precarious; nowhere else such multitudes of people overworked at one time and totally destitute of employment at other times; nowhere else do we see such masses of the population subsisting upon pittances wholly inadequate to sustain human beings in health and strength; nowhere else do we find jails and workhouses so overcrowded; nowhere else do we hear of whole districts depopulated by famine, nor of upwards of 1,500,000 out of eight millions of people being cut off by actual starvation and forced expatriation in the course of twelve months, as has happened in Ireland in our own times. All this, too, we find to be contemporaneous and in juxtaposition with granaries, warehouses, and shops teeming with a superabundance of the choicest produce of all climes--with cries of over-production and glutted markets ringing in our ears wherever we pass--and with the most opulent and numerous aristocracy, territorial and commercial, that was ever known to be congregated in any country of seven times the extent--to say nothing of a still more numerous middle-class, in whose ranks may be found some thousands far surpassing German counts or German princes in command of wealth and luxury. Hence, no doubt, it was that Sir Robert Peel, not many years since, accounted in Parliament for our distress by assuring the House that “the occasional distress and destitution of great numbers of people was a necessary consequence of our advanced civilization, and was therefore a thing naturally to be expected in such a country as England.”