Labour.  And if the operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he insists that he is not Labour, but a man, who possesses, among other things, the attribute of labour force, if he takes it into his head that he need not allow himself to be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity “Labour,” the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill.  He cannot comprehend that he holds any other relation to the operatives than that of purchase and sale; he sees in them not human beings, but hands, as he constantly calls them to their faces; he insists, as Carlyle says, that “Cash Payment is the only nexus between man and man.”  Even the relation between himself and his wife is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, mere “Cash Payment.”  Money determines the worth of the man; he is “worth ten thousand pounds.”  He who has money is of “the better sort of people,” is “influential,” and what he does counts for something in his social circle.  The huckstering spirit penetrates the whole language, all relations are expressed in business terms, in economic categories.  Supply and demand are the formulas according to which the logic of the English bourgeois judges all human life.  Hence free competition in every respect, hence the regime of laissez-faire, laissez-aller in government, in medicine, in education, and soon to be in religion, too, as the State Church collapses more and more.  Free competition will suffer no limitation, no State supervision; the whole State is but a burden to it.  It would reach its highest perfection in a wholly ungoverned anarchic society, where each might exploit the other to his heart’s content.  Since, however, the bourgeoisie cannot dispense with government, but must have it to hold the equally indispensable proletariat in check, it turns the power of government against the proletariat and keeps out of its way as far as possible.

Let no one believe, however, that the “cultivated” Englishman openly brags with his egotism.  On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy.  What?  The wealthy English fail to remember the poor?  They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of!  Philanthropic institutions forsooth!  As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them!  Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.  But let us hear the English bourgeoisie’s own words.  It is not yet a year since I read in the Manchester Guardian the following letter to the editor, which was published without comment as a perfectly natural, reasonable thing: