Quiz: The Condition of the Working Class in England

10 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. What does Engels say is the real importance of trade unions? They will in time replace the state and administer all industry for the workers They are able to raise wages permanently above the level set by competition They make strikes unnecessary by settling disputes with the masters peacefully They are the workers’ first attempt to abolish competition among themselves
2. What does Engels say English industry needs, except in the brief periods of highest prosperity? A state monopoly An unemployed reserve army of workers Slave labour Imported capital from Holland and America
3. Which writer’s description of the Irish does Engels quote? Thomas Babington Macaulay Thomas Robert Malthus Thomas Carlyle Charles Dickens
4. What does Engels say England possessed in the impoverished population of Ireland? A reserve at command for the rapid extension of English industry A source of capital, since the rents of Irish estates were spent in England A market for English cottons and hardware, safe from foreign competition A military danger, since the Irish poor were ever ready to rise against England
5. Which workers does Engels say formed “an aristocracy among the working-class” after 1848? Agricultural labourers in the southern counties, after the repeal of the Corn Laws Factory hands under the Factory Acts and members of the great trade unions The miners of Wales and the north, after the great colliery strikes of the 1840s Irish immigrants who had risen to be overlookers in the Lancashire cotton mills
6. What proportion of working-class children in Manchester perish before their fifth year, according to the report Engels cites? About ninety-five per cent About one per cent Rather less than twenty per cent More than fifty-seven per cent
7. In comparing the worker with the serf, what does Engels say the serf at least has? A scrap of land on which to live A fixed wage Freedom to move away A vote
8. Which article of 1885 does Engels reprint in the 1892 preface? “The Origin of the Family” “The Housing Question” “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” “England in 1845 and in 1885”
9. What is the average life of the Sheffield dry grinders, according to Engels? Fifty years Scarcely twenty-five years Hardly thirty-five years About forty-five years
10. According to the 1892 preface, what reforms did large-scale capital itself come to support? A minimum wage Old-age pensions paid for by a tax on the landlords Suppression of truck and the Ten Hours’ Bill Abolition of private property in land and mines

0 of 10 answered