which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic, have now, with the
growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation,
discomfort, and misery. Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no
longer tolerated. The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art
of hiding the distress of the working-class. But that, in regard to
their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place, is amply
proved by the Report of the Royal Commission "on the Housing of the
Poor," 1885. And this is the case, too, in other respects. Police
regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge
in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it.

But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist
exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it.
France, Germany, and especially America, are the formidable competitors
who, at this moment--as foreseen by me in 1844--are more and more
breaking up England's industrial monopoly. Their manufactures are young
as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more rapid
rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment
arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in
1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking.
True, the external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in
America are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and
the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same
order. Hence we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-
day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and
children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the
cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the "bosses" as a
means of domination over the workers. When I received, in 1886, the
American papers with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian
coal-miners in the Connellsville district, I seemed but to read my own