The rapid expansion of English industrial manufacturing brought along with it higher demands for labor. Accordingly, troops of workers migrated from agricultural districts to newly minted urban communities in search of higher wages. Population density grew, with nearly all of that growth taking place in the proletariat. Thus, the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the British Empire took shape, in which at least three-fourths of the population belonged to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consisted of only small shopkeepers and very few craftsmen.

The rise of industrial manufacturing not only transformed tools into machines, workrooms into factories, and consequently, the toiling lower middle-class into the toiling proletariat, but it also transformed the former large merchants into manufacturing giants. The result was that the lower middle-class was thoroughly hollowed out. Thus, the population was reduced to two opposing elements: the workers and the owners. In the place of the former masters and apprentices, came great capitalists and working-men who had no prospect of rising above their economic class. Handwork was carried on after the fashion of factory work, the division of labor was strictly applied, and small employers who could not compete with the large industrial establishments were forced down into the proletariat.

At the same time the destruction of the former organization of handwork, and the disappearance of the lower middle-class deprived the worker of all possibility of rising into the middle-class himself. Until then, he had always had the prospect of establishing himself somewhere as a master artificer, perhaps employing journeymen and apprentices and thus establishing himself in the lower middle-class; but when master artificers were crowded out by manufacturers, when large capital had become necessary for carrying on work independently, the working-class became, for the first time, an integral, permanent class of the population, whereas it had formerly often been merely a transition leading to the bourgeoisie. For capitalism to flourish, a large, permanent working class was required. In this new system, he who was born to toil had no other prospect than that of remaining a toiler all his life. It was this reality that led the proletariat to undertake an independent movement, what we now call today, “the workers’ movement.”

In this way were mobilized countless workers whose social conditions demanded the attention of the civilized world. The conditions of the working-class were the conditions of the vast majority of the English people. The question of that day was: What is to become of those destitute millions, who consumed today what they earned yesterday; who had created the greatness of England by their inventions and their toil; who became with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demanded, with daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society? Nearly all Parliamentary debates of that day could be reduced to denying this question; and, though the English middle-class was not as yet ready to admit it, though they tried to evade this great question, and to represent their own particular interests as the truly national ones, their action was destined to fail. It was high time for the English owners to make some concessions to the working-men who no longer plead but threatened for their fair share. It was by these means that large-scale labor reforms were achieved in England.

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