 Strike is the order of the day. During the present week 5,000 miners have struck in the northern coal district; 400 to 500 journeymen corkcutters in London; about 2,000 laborers employed by the different wharfingers on the Thames; the police force at Hull, similar attempts being made by the City and general Metropolitan Police; and finally the bricklayers employed at St. Stephens, under the very nose of Parliament. The world is becoming a very paradise for laborers. Men are becoming valuable, exclaims The Times, In order to reduce that paradise to terrestrial dimensions, the mill-lords of Lancashire have formed an association, for mutually assisting and supporting each other against the demands of the people. But not content with opposing combination to combination, the bourgeoisie threaten to appeal to the interference of law of law dictated by themselves. In what manner this is done may be inferred from the following expectorations of The Morning Post, the organ of the liberal and amiable Palmerston. If there is a piece of wickedness which pre-eminently deserves to be punished with an iron hand, it is the system of strikes.... What is wanted is some stringent and summary mode of punishing the leaders and chief men of these combinations.[...] it would be no interference with the freedom of the labor market to treat these fellows to a flogging.... It is idle to say that this would interfere with the labor market. As long as those who supply the labor market refrain from jeopardizing the interests of the country, they may be left to make their own terms with the employers. Within a certain conventional limit, the laborers shall be allowed to imagine themselves to be free agents of production, and that their contracts with their masters are settled by mutual convention; but that limit passed, labor is to be openly enforced upon them on conditions prescribed by Parliament, that permanent Combination Committee of the ruling classes against the people. And this is the same country in which the celebrated Swift, the founder of the first Lunatic Asylum in Ireland, doubted whether 90 madmen could be found.
Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune 1853