In the manufacturing districts of England it has been ascertained that half the children born to the artisans die before they complete their fifth year, and that the average duration of human life amongst the working classes is only some 17 or 18 years, while it averages 38 years amongst the “better classes,” _i.e._, amongst the landlords and profitmongers who reap the best fruits of their toil. This is an arbitrary confiscation or squandering of human life not to be found, even in time of war, in any other country not manufacturing, mining, and commercial. The men composing the master-class in these callings are, with hardly an exception, open and even avowed enemies of the political and social rights of the working classes. They have literally expelled the people from every institution in the State. They and their accomplices, the landlords and tenant-farmers, have usurped and absorbed all the prerogatives of the Crown and all the rights of the people. They have turned the producers out of parliament, out of the corporations, out of the vestries, out of the juries, out of the magistracy, out of the church, out of the public press, out of all the public boards--in a word, out of every department of the State, and left them without a single legislator, magistrate, administrator, common-councilman, vestryman, or public organ of any kind to represent or protect their interests. But it is not simply of what are called their organic or political rights that these tyrants have despoiled the working classes; they have also robbed them of all _proprietary_ and _occupancy_ rights in the soil, combining for that purpose with the landlords and the tenant-farmers, to whom the sight of an agricultural labourer putting a spade or a plough into the land on his own account, or in any other capacity than that of a wages-slave to some bull-frog farmer, is the horror of horrors. Just as farmers in the rural districts will take vacant farms they do not want, and at rents by which they know they must be losers, merely to keep out labourers or exclude from occupancy the men they want for slaves, so will these mining and manufacturing tyrants rent on long leases, or actually buy up outright, lands in the neighbourhood of the towns where their factories are, to prevent their toiling slaves from having the chance of renting them, or any portion of them, however small, lest they might be able to escape the slavery of the mill through comparative independence.