to pay house-rent whether they occupy the house or not. {184} The cottage system is universal in the country districts; it has created whole villages, and the manufacturer usually has little or no competition against his houses, so that he can fix his price regardless of any market rate, indeed at his pleasure.  And what power does the cottage system give the employer over his operatives in disagreements between master and men?  If the latter strike, he need only give them notice to quit his premises, and the notice need only be a week; after that time the operative is not only without bread but without a shelter, a vagabond at the mercy of the law which sends him, without fail, to the treadmill.

Such is the factory system sketched as fully as my space permits, and with as little partisan spirit as the heroic deeds of the bourgeoisie against the defenceless workers permit—­deeds to wards which it is impossible to remain indifferent, towards which indifference were a crime.  Let us compare the condition of the free Englishman of 1845 with the Saxon serf under the lash of the Norman barons of 1145.  The serf was glebae adscriptus, bound to the soil, so is the free working-man through the cottage system.  The serf owed his master the jus primae noctis, the right of the first night—­the free working-man must, on demand, surrender to his master not only that, but the right of every night.  The serf could acquire no property; everything that he gained, his master could take from him; the free working-man has no property, can gain none by reason of the pressure of competition, and what even the Norman baron did not do, the modern manufacturer does.  Through the truck system, he assumes every day the administration in detail of the things which the worker requires for his immediate necessities.  The relation of the lord of the soil to the serf was regulated by the prevailing customs and by-laws which were obeyed, because they corresponded to them.  The free working-man’s relation to his master is regulated by laws which are not obeyed, because they correspond neither with the interests of the employer nor with the prevailing customs.  The lord of the soil could not separate the serf from the land, nor sell him apart from it, and since almost all the land was fief and there was no capital, practically could not sell him at all.  The modern bourgeois forces the working-man to sell himself.  The serf was the slave of the piece of land on which he was born, the working-man is the slave of his own necessaries of life and of the money with which he has to buy them—­both are slaves of a thing.  The serf had a guarantee for the means of subsistence in the feudal order of society in which every member had his own place.  The free working-man has no guarantee whatsoever, because he has a place in society only when the bourgeoisie can make use of him; in all other cases he is ignored, treated as non-existent.  The serf sacrificed himself