The contests about wages in Manufacture, pre-suppose manufacture,
 and are in no sense directed against its existence. The opposition against
 the establishment of new manufactures, proceeds from the guilds and privileged
 towns, not from the workpeople. Hence the writers of the manufacturing
 period treat the division of labour chiefly as a means of virtually supplying
 a deficiency of labourers, and not as a means of actually displacing those
 in work. This distinction is self-evident. If it be said that 100 millions
 of people would be required in England to spin with the old spinning-wheel
 the cotton that is now spun with mules by 500,000 people, this does not
 mean that the mules took the place of those millions who never existed.
 It means only this, that many millions of workpeople would be required
 to replace the spinning machinery. If, on the other hand, we say, that
 in England the power-loom threw 800,000 weavers on the streets, we do not
 refer to existing machinery, that would have to be replaced by a definite
 number of workpeople, but to a number of weavers in existence who were
 actually replaced or displaced by the looms. During the manufacturing period,
 handicraft labour, altered though it was by division of labour, was yet
 the basis. The demands of the new colonial markets could not be satisfied
 owing 405to the relatively small number of town operatives handed
 down from the middle ages, and the manufactures proper opened out new fields
 of production to the rural population, driven from the land by the dissolution
 of the feudal system. At that time, therefore, division of labour and co-operation
 in the workshops, were viewed more from the positive aspect, that they
 made the workpeople more productive. [114] Long before the period of modern industry, co-operation and the concentration of the
 instruments of labour in the hands of a few, gave rise, in numerous countries
 where these methods were applied in agriculture, to great, sudden and forcible
 revolutions in the modes of production, and consequentially, in the conditions
 of existence, and the means of employment of the rural populations. But
 this contest at first takes place more between the large and the small
 landed proprietors, than between capital and wage labour; on the other
 hand, when the labourers are displaced by the instruments of labour, by
 sheep, horses, &c., in this case force is directly resorted to in the
 first instance as the prelude to the industrial revolution. The labourers
 are first driven from the land, and then come the sheep. Land grabbing
 on a great scale, such as was perpetrated in England, is the first step
 in creating a field for the establishment of agriculture on a great scale.
 [115] Hence this subversion of agriculture puts on,
 at first, more the appearance of a political revolution.