The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural
 population, intermittent but renewed again and again, supplied, as we saw,
 the town industries with a mass of proletarians entirely unconnected with
 the corporate guilds and unfettered by them; a fortunate circumstance that
 makes old A. Anderson (not to be confounded with James Anderson), in his
 “History of Commerce,” believe in the direct intervention of Providence.
 We must still pause a moment on this element of primitive accumulation.
 The thinning-out of the independent, self-supporting peasants not only
 brought about the crowding together of the industrial proletariat, in the
 way that Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the condensation of cosmical
 matter at one place, by its rarefaction at another. [1]
 In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth
 as much or more produce, after as before, because the revolution in the
 conditions of landed property was accompanied by improved methods of culture,
 greater co-operation, concentration of the means of production, &c.,
 and because not only were the agricultural wage labourers put on the strain
 more intensely [2], but the field of production on which
 they worked for themselves became more and more contracted. With the setting
 free of a part of the agricultural population, therefore, their former
 means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into
 material elements of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast
 adrift, must buy their value in the form of wages, from his new master,
 the industrial capitalist. That which holds good of the means of subsistence
 holds with the raw materials of industry dependent upon home agriculture.
 They were transformed into an element of constant capital. Suppose, e.g.,
 a part of the Westphalian peasants, who, at the time of Frederick II, all
 span flax, forcibly expropriated and hunted from the soil; and the other
 part that remained, turned into day labourers of large farmers. At the same
 time arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in which
 the men “set free” now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as before.
 Not a fibre of it is changed, but a new social soul has popped into its
 body. It forms now a part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer.
 Formerly divided among a number of small producers, who cultivated it themselves
 and with their families spun it in retail fashion, it is now concentrated
 in the hand of one capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for
 him. The extra labour expended in flax-spinning realised itself formerly
 in extra income to numerous peasant families, or maybe, in Frederick II’s
 time, in taxes pour le roi de Prusse. It realises itself now in profit
 for a few capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over
 the face of the country, are now crowded together in a few great labour-barracks,
 together with the labourers and the raw material. And spindles, looms, raw
 material, are now transformed from means of independent existence for the
 spinners and weavers, into means for commanding them and sucking out of
 them unpaid labour. [3] One does not perceive, when looking
 at the large manufactories and the large farms, that they have originated
 from the throwing into one of many small centres of production, and have
 been built up by the expropriation of many small independent producers.
 Nevertheless, the popular intuition was not at fault. In the time of Mirabeau,
 the lion of the Revolution, the great manufactories were still called manufactures
 réunies, workshops thrown into one, as we speak of fields thrown into one.
 Says Mirabeau: