[145]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 8 ff.
[146]Cf. e.g. Capital, vol. ii, pp. 430, 522, and 529.
[147]In the review of an essay on Observations on the injurious Consequences of the Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce, by a Member of the late Parliament, London, 1820 (Edinburgh Review, vol. lxvi, pp. 331 ff.). This interesting document, from which the following extracts are taken, an essay with a Free Trade bias, paints the general position of the workers in England in the most dismal colours. It gives the facts as follows: ‘The manufacturing classes in Great Britain ... have been suddenly reduced from affluence and prosperity to the extreme of poverty and misery. In one of the debates in the late Session of Parliament, it was stated that the wages of weavers of Glasgow and its vicinity which, when highest, had averaged about 25s. or 27s. a week, had been reduced in 1816 to 10s.; and in 1819 to the wretched pittance of 5-6s. or 6s. They have not since been materially augmented.’ In Lancashire, according to the same evidence, the direct weekly wage of the weavers was from 6s. to 12s. a week for 15 hours’ labour a day, whilst half-starved children worked 12 to 16 hours a day for 2s. or 3s. a week. Distress in Yorkshire was, if possible, even greater. As to the address by the frame-work knitters of Nottingham, the author says that he himself investigated conditions and had come to the conclusion that the declarations of the workers ‘were not in the slightest degree exaggerated’.
[148]Ibid., p. 334.
[149]Paris, 1827.
[150]Preface to the second edition. Translation by M. Mignet, in Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government (London, 1847), pp. 114 ff.
[151]Nouveaux Principes ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 79.
[152]Nouveaux Principes ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. xv.
[153]Ibid., p. 92.
[154]Ibid., pp. 111-12.