e workers against the higher classes. This rage, this
passion, is rather the proof that the workers feel the inhumanity of
their position, that they refuse to be degraded to the level of brutes,
and that they will one day free themselves from servitude to the
bourgeoisie. This may be seen in the case of those who do not share this
wrath; they either bow humbly before the fate that overtakes them, live a
respectful private life as well as they can, do not concern themselves as
to the course of public affairs, help the bourgeoisie to forge the chains
of the workers yet more securely, and stand upon the plane of
intellectual nullity that prevailed before the industrial period began;
or they are tossed about by fate, lose their moral hold upon themselves
as they have already lost their economic hold, live along from day to
day, drink and fall into licentiousness; and in both cases they are
brutes. The last-named class contributes chiefly to the "rapid increase
of vice," at which the bourgeoisie is so horrified after itself setting
in motion the causes which give rise to it.

Another source of demoralisation among the workers is their being
condemned to work. As voluntary, productive activity is the highest
enjoyment known to us, so is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading
punishment. Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some
one thing every day from morning until night against one's will. And the
more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be to
him, because he feels the constraint, the aimlessness of it for himself.
Why does he work? For love of work? From a natural impulse? Not at
all! He works for money, for a thing which has nothing whatsoever to do
with the work itself; and he works so long, moreover, and in such
unbroken monotony, that this alone must make his work a torture in the
first weeks if he has the least human feeling left. The division of
labour has multiplied the brutalising influences of forced work. In most
branches the worker's activity is reduced to some paltry, purely
mechanical manipulation, repeated minute after minute, unchanged year
after year. {119} How much human feeling, what abilities can a man
retain in his thirtieth year, who has made needle points or filed toothed
wheels twelve hours every day from his early childhood, living all the
time under the conditions forced upon the English proletarian? It is
still the same thing since the in