The plain people are the bricks which the imperial class uses to build into a wall about the empire. They are the mortar also, for they man the ships and fill up the gaps in the infantry ranks and the losses in the machine gun corps. They are the body of the empire as the rulers are its guiding spirit.
When ships are required to carry the surplus wealth of the ruling class into foreign markets, the workers build them. When surplus is needed to be utilized in taking advantage of some particularly attractive investment opportunity the workers create it. They lay down the keels of the fighting ships, and their sons aim and fire the guns. They are drafted into the army in time of war and their bodies are fed to the cannon which other workers in other countries, or perhaps in the same country, have made for just such purposes. The workers are the warp and woof of empire, yet they are not the gainers by it. Quite the contrary, they are merely the means by which their masters extend their dominion over other workers who have not yet been scientifically exploited.
The work of empire building falls to the lot of the workers. The profits of empire building go to the exploiting class.
3. The British Workers
What advantage came to the workers of Rome from the Empire which their hands shaped and which their blood cemented together? Their masters took their farms, converted the small fields into great, slave-worked estates, and drove the husbandmen into the alleys and tenements of the city where they might eke out an existence as best they could. The rank-and-file Roman derived the same advantage from the Roman Empire that the rank-and-file Briton has derived from the British Empire.
Great Britain has exercised more world mastery during the past hundred years than any other nation. All that Germany hoped to achieve Great Britain has realized. Her traders carry the world's commerce, her financiers clip profits from international business transactions, her manufacturers sell to the people of every country, the sun never sets on the British flag.
Great Britain is the foremost exponent and practitioner of capitalist imperialism. The British Empire is the greatest that the world has known since the Empire of Rome fell to pieces. Whatever benefits modern imperialism brings either for capitalists or for workers should be enjoyed by the capitalists and workers of Great Britain.
Until the Great World War the capitalists of Great Britain were the most powerful on earth with a larger foreign trade and a larger foreign investment than any other. At the same time the British workers were amongst the worst exploited of those in any capitalist country in Europe.
The entire nineteenth century is one long and terrible record of master-class exploitation inside the British Isles. The miseries of modern India have been paralleled in the lives of the workers of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Gibbins, in his description of the conditions of the child workers in the early years of the nineteenth century ends with the remark, "One dares not trust oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told of this awful page of the history of industrial England."[58]