THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 888
profit remains relentless. When people wanted to take children under nine years of age out of cotton mills because the iron foundries which could not use any children
became philanthropic, the pious English textile manufacturers proved that cotton spinning would have to perish if it could not use the little workers ‘who crawl around
with ease beneath the machines and on the one hand can do the cleaning and on the other can tie on the threads’. It was irrelevant for churchgoers that many of the little
workers died in accidents; uninteresting for the classical land of democracy that only a fraction of the consumptive or scurvy­mouthed workforce reached the age of
forty and none of them the age of fifty. Jonathan Swift, who knew his England, was already making the differently bitter proposal a hundred years before this, when no
industry was as yet devouring everything around it, that in order to control the misery of children one might fatten the fruits of the womb of poverty for the tables of the
rich: ‘It would encrease the Care and Tenderness of Mothers towards their children, when they were sure of a Settlement for life, to the poor Babes, provided in some
Sort by the Publick, to their annual Profit instead of Expence; we should soon see an honest Emulation among the married Women, which of them could bring the
fattest Child to the Market.’* This proposal, stylized as a petition to Parliament and adorned with many quotes from the Bible, was prophetic; industry even devoured
children under six years old, and by no means well­fed ones.
The parents of these children were still not provided for, of course. Although, something which Swift could not foresee, they also shared in the blessings of British trade.
The worker namely had to spend his six hours of free time in having to earn all over again the wages that had been paid out to him, in other words: in the initial stages of
this capitalism, he very often received his wages not in cash but in goods in kind, in products of his own factory, in umbrellas and the like, which he first laboriously had
to turn into money on the market. What a sublime form of making out of the wage­slave an unpaid salesman as well; even the wages still served profit in the so­called
truck­system. The only means of forgetting this unprecedented misery was spirits; occasionally wild despair broke out, machines were wrecked, factories set on fire, —
with little other effect than the death penalty, which was imposed for such convulsions from 1811. In his work: ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, Engels
allowed this condition to speak for itself, with the result: ‘Rising
* Bloch's text does not appear to be a direct quotation from Swift here, unless he is using a very free translation. We have included the closest example from ‘A
Modest Proposal’.