exceptional penal legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters themselves in their capacity
as justices of the peace. Two years earlier, the same House of Commons and the same Mr. Gladstone
in the well-known straightforward fashion brought in a bill for the abolition of all exceptional penal legislation
against the working-class. But this was never allowed to go beyond the second reading, and the matter
was thus protracted until at last the "great Liberal 'party," by an alliance with the Tories, found courage to
turn against the very proletariat that had carried it into power. Not content with this treachery, the "great
Liberal party" allowed the English judges, ever complaisant in the service of the ruling classes, to dig up
again the earlier laws against "conspiracy," and to apply them to coalitions of labourers. We see that
only against its will and under the pressure of the masses did the English Parliament give up the laws
against Strikes and Trades' Unions, after it had itself, for 500 years, held, with shameless egoism, the
position of a permanent Trades' Union of the capitalists against the labourers.
During the very first storms of the revolution, the French bourgeoisie dared to take away from the workers
the right of association but just acquired. By a decree of June 14, 1791, they declared all coalition of
the workers as "an attempt against liberty and the declaration of the rights of man," punishable by a fine
of 500 livres, together with deprivation of the rights of an active citizen for one year.6 This law which, by
means of State compulsion, confined the struggle between capital and labour within limits comfortable
for capital, has outlived revolutions and changes of dynasties. Even the Reign of Terror left it untouched.
It was but quite recently struck out of the Penal Code. Nothing is more characteristic than the pretext for
this bourgeois coup d'état. "Granting," says Chapelier, the reporter of the Select Committee on this law,
"that wages ought to be a little higher than they are, ... that they ought to be high enough for him that
receives them, to be free from that state of absolute dependence due to the want of the necessaries of
life, and which is almost that of slavery," yet the workers must not be allowed to come to any understanding
about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their "absolute dependence, which is
almost that of slavery;" because, forsooth, in doing this they injure "the freedom of their cidevant masters,
the present entrepreneurs," and because a coalition against the despotism of the quondam masters of
the corporations is — guess what! — is a restoration of the corporations abolished by the French constitution.7
