THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 183
—these are ideas which could only be hatched in the brain of an unintelligible poet.
In England strikes have regularly given rise to in- vention and to the application of new machinery. Machines were, we might say, the arms which the capitalists used to defeat revolted labor. The self-acting mule, the greatest invention in modern industry, put the revolted hand-spinners out of action. Even when combination and strikes have no other effect than to arouse against them the efforts of mechanical genius, they always exercise an immense influence on the devei- opment of industry.
“T find,’ continues M. Proudhon, “from an article published by M. Leon Faucher . . . . September, 1845, that for some time English workmen have ceased to form combinations, which is certainly a progress upon which they are to be congratulated. But this improvement in the morality of the workers arises above all from their economic knowledge. ‘It is not upon the manufacturers,’ cried a working spinner at a meeting at Bolton, ‘that wages depend. In periods of depression the masters are only, so to speak, the whips with which necessity is armed, and, whether they will or no, they must strike. The regulating principle is the relation between supply and demand; and the masters have not the power.” “Well and good,” cries M. Proudhon, “these are well developed model workmen, &c., &c. The poverty we have here does not exist in England; it cannot cross the Channel.” (Proudhon, Vol. I., pp. 261 and 262.)
Of all the towns in England, Bolton is one in which Radicalism is as fully developed as anywhere. Than the workers of Bolton there are none more revolutionary. During the great agitation in England for the abolition of the Corn Laws, the English manufacturers felt that
