adly, in the
mine; partly fierce[1] and exhaustive, at the furnace; partly foolish
and sedentary, of ill-taught students making bad designs: work from the
beginning to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches of it,
venomous, deathful, and miserable. Now, how did it come to pass that
this work was done instead of the other; that the strength and life of
the English operative were spent in defiling ground, instead of
redeeming it; and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless
piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of
medicinal fresh air, and pure water?

There is but one reason for it, and at present a conclusive one,--that
the capitalist can charge per-centage on the work in the one case, and
cannot in the other. If, having certain funds for supporting labour at
my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground in order, my money is,
in that function, spent once for all; but if I pay them to dig iron out
of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for the
ground, and per-centage both on the manufacture and the sale, and make
my capital profitable in these three bye-ways. The greater part of the
profitable investment of capital, in the present day, is in operations
of this kind, in which the public is persuaded to buy something of no
use to it, on production, or sale, of which, the capitalist may charge
per-centage; the said public remaining all the while under the
persuasion that the per-centages thus obtained are real national gains,
whereas, they are merely filchings out of partially light pockets, to
swell heavy ones.

Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, to make himself more
conspicuous to drunkards. The public-housekeeper on the other side of
the way presently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. Both are,
as to their _relative_ attractiveness to customers of taste, just where
they were before; but they have lost the price of the railings; which
they must either themselves finally lose, or make their aforesaid
customers of taste pay, by raising the price of their beer, or
adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their customers, are thus
poorer by precisely what the capitalist has gained; and the value of the
work itself, meantime, has been lost to the nation; the iron bars in
that form and place being wholly useless. It is this mode of taxation of
the poor by the rich which is referred to in the text (page 31), in
comparing the modern acqu