One more point remains to be noticed.  The factory operatives, and especially those of the cotton district, form the nucleus of the labour movement.  Lancashire, and especially Manchester, is the seat of the most powerful Unions, the central point of Chartism, the place which numbers most Socialists.  The more the factory system has taken possession of a branch of industry, the more the working-men employed in it participate in the labour movement; the sharper the opposition between working-men and capitalists, the clearer the proletarian consciousness in the working-men.  The small masters of Birmingham, though they suffer from the crises, still stand upon an unhappy middle ground between proletarian Chartism and shopkeepers’ Radicalism.  But, in general, all the workers employed in manufacture are won for one form or the other of resistance to capital and bourgeoisie; and all are united upon this point, that they, as working-men, a title of which they are proud, and which is the usual form of address in Chartist meetings, form a separate class, with separate interests and principles, with a separate way of looking at things in contrast with that of all property owners; and that in this class reposes the strength and the capacity of development of the nation.

THE MINING PROLETARIAT.

The production of raw materials and fuel for a manufacture so colossal as that of England requires a considerable number of workers.  But of all the materials needed for its industries (except wool, which belongs to the agricultural districts), England produces only the minerals:  the metals and the coal.  While Cornwall possesses rich copper, tin, zinc, and lead mines, Staffordshire, Wales, and other districts yield great quantities of iron, and almost the whole North and West of England, central Scotland, and certain districts of Ireland, produce a superabundance of coal. {241}

In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground.  Within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively.  The condition of these workers seems, according to the Children’s Employment Commission’s Reports, to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their strong, bold miners, who follow the veins of mineral below the bottom of the very sea.  But in the matter of the health of these workers, this same Children’s Employment Commission’s Report judges differently.  It shows in Dr. Barham’s intelligent report how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust and the smoke of blasting powder, such as prevails in the mines, seriously affects the lungs, disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs; that wearing toil, and especially the climbing up and down of ladders, upon which even vigorous young men have to spend in