description of the North of England colliers' strike of 1844. The same
cheating of the workpeople by false measure; the same truck-system; the
same attempt to break the miners' resistance by the capitalists' last,
but crushing, resource,--the eviction of the men out of their dwellings,
the cottages owned by the companies.

I have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date,
or to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since
1844. And for two reasons: Firstly, to do this properly, the size of the
book must be about doubled; and, secondly, the first volume of "Das
Kapital," by Karl Marx, an English translation of which is before the
public, contains a very ample description of the state of the British
working-class, as it was about 1865, that is to say, at the time when
British industrial prosperity reached its culminating point. I should,
then, have been obliged again to go over the ground already covered by
Marx's celebrated work.

It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical
standpoint of this book--philosophical, economical, political--does not
exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. Modern international
Socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost
exclusively through the efforts of Marx, did not as yet exist in 1844. My
book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as
the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches
of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the
descent of modern Socialism from one of its ancestors,--German
philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is
not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing
the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class,
from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract,