The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 2
First Visit to Manchester
On the conclusion of his military service he returned to Barmen, and, in October, 1842, he went to Manchester as agent to the spinning factory of Ermen and Engels, of which his father was partner. On this journey Engels called at the editorial offices of the Rheinische Zeitung, in Cologne, and there met Marx for the first time. But this first meeting between them was very cool. Engels had been influenced against Marx by the brothers Bauer, with whom he was still intimate, whilst Marx had already fallen out with them and was then finally breaking his connection with the Berlin "free" school of philosophers, to whom Engels still paid allegiance. In addition to philosophy, Engels was even then keenly interested in economics, and here in Manchester, the industrial capital of the motherland of capitalism, he had a unique opportunity of studying economics and economic conditions at first hand, of which he was not slow to make use. The twenty-one months he spent in England on this occasion was of supreme importance to his and Marx's future life’s work. Studying at first hand the relations between employer and employed, observing the actual miserable conditions of the working class in a system of almost fully-fledged capitalism, his interest in the proletarian movement grew rapidly, and we soon find him taking an active part in the agitation of the Utopian Socialists, as also of the purely Labour and Chartist movement. Thus he was associated with both the Owenite paper, the New Moral World, and with the Chartist organ, the Northern Star. His philosophic insight and keen intellect very soon appreciated the true tendencies of capitalist production and the present role of the workers as well as the great historic future before the working class. In the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, he published a criticism of national economy which Marx characterised as a sketch of true genius, not because it did not contain many mistakes in detail and some errors in judgment, but because of the way in which he treated the feverish acceleration of capitalist production and the dehumanising effect of capitalist competition. This, and his views on Malthus’s theory of population, commercial crises, the wage laws, the progress of science, and so forth, already contained the fruitful germs of scientific communism. Already in this small sketch he showed that he had grasped what was best, what was most revolutionary in the Hegelian philosophy, and was using it as the master key for unravelling the mysteries of historic and economic development. In the same journal he published an interesting criticism of Carlyle's Past and Present, which he characterised as the only book in the English literature of the year 1843 that was worth reading.
Considering that he was then only twenty-two years old, that he himself was suffering from none of the disabilities of the workers' life, that he himself belonged by family, education, and profession to the bourgeoisie, it is not without interest to note the judgment he passes on the English classes and parties of the time.
After describing in vigorous language the spiritual emptiness of the English aristocracy and bourgeoisie, he characterises the educated Englishman, according to whom the English national character has generally been judged on the Continent, as the "most abject slave under the sun," and then continues: "Only the section of the English nation hitherto unknown on the Continent, only the workers, the pariahs of England, the poor, are really respectable in spite of all their rawness and all their demoralisation. It is they who will save England, they still present educational material. They have no education, but neither have they narrow prejudices. They still possess power for great national work, they still have a future before them." Of the two parties into which the educated classes were split, Engels finds the Tories, bad as they are, less objectionable than the Whigs, who looked upon everything in industry, which had given them power and wealth, as quite faultless, and regarded its extension as the only aim of all legislation.