and ever-increasing Proletariat—­a great disorganised mass of human beings, without homes, without permanent domicile, without property of any kind, without any stake in the existing institutions.  Part of these gain a miserable pittance as agricultural labourers, and live in a condition infinitely worse than serfage.  The others have been forever uprooted from the soil, and have collected in the large towns, where they earn a precarious living in the factories and workshops, or swell the ranks of the criminal classes.  In England you have no longer a peasantry in the proper sense of the term, and unless some radical measures be very soon adopted, you will never be able to create such a class, for men who have been long exposed to the unwholesome influences of town life are physically and morally incapable of becoming agriculturists.

“Hitherto,” the disquisition proceeded, “England has enjoyed, in consequence of her geographical position, her political freedom, and her vast natural deposits of coal and iron, a wholly exceptional position in the industrial world.  Fearing no competition, she has proclaimed the principles of Free Trade, and has inundated the world with her manufactures—­using unscrupulously her powerful navy and all the other forces at her command for breaking down every barrier tending to check the flood sent forth from Manchester and Birmingham.  In that way her hungry Proletariat has been fed.  But the industrial supremacy of England is drawing to a close.  The nations have discovered the perfidious fallacy of Free-Trade principles, and are now learning to manufacture for their own wants, instead of paying England enormous sums to manufacture for them.  Very soon English goods will no longer find foreign markets, and how will the hungry Proletariat then be fed?  Already the grain production of England is far from sufficient for the wants of the population, so that, even when the harvest is exceptionally abundant, enormous quantities of wheat are imported from all quarters of the globe.  Hitherto this grain has been paid for by the manufactured goods annually exported, but how will it be procured when these goods are no longer wanted by foreign consumers?  And what then will the hungry Proletariat do?"*

* This passage was written, precisely as it stands, long before the fiscal question was raised by Mr. Chamberlain.  It will be found in the first edition of this work, published in 1877. (Vol.  I., pp. 179-81.)

This sombre picture of England’s future had often been presented to me, and on nearly every occasion I had been assured that Russia had been saved from these terrible evils by the rural Commune—­an institution which, in spite of its simplicity and incalculable utility, West Europeans seemed utterly incapable of understanding and appreciating.

The reader will now easily conceive with what interest I took to studying this wonderful institution, and with what energy I prosecuted my researches.  An institution which professes to solve satisfactorily the most difficult social problems of the future is not to be met with every day, even in Russia, which is specially rich in material for the student of social science.