What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of western Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and the monks had made Mediaevalism?  Some had degenerated into bourgeois traders, managers and financeers, but the great majority had been crushed down and down in the mass of submerged proletariat, losing liberty, degenerating in character, becoming more and more servile in status and wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate, dully ebullient mass, cut off from society, cut off almost from life itself.

I must insist on these three factors in the development of society and its present catastrophe:  the great, predominant, central body of free men during the Middle Ages, their supersession during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a non-producing bourgeoisie, and the creation during the same period of a submerged proletariat.  They are factors of great significance and potential force.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began.  Within the space of an hundred years came all the revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the world.  During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny, had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had wrecked the moral stamina, “freedom of conscience” had obliterated the guiding and restraining power of the old religion.  The field was clear for a new dispensation.

What happened was interesting and significant.  Coal and iron, and their derivatives—­steam and machinery—­rapidly revealed their possibilities.  To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be available in large quantities and freely subject to exploitation; that unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should be discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.  The conditions of the time made all these possible.  The land-holding peasantry of England—­and it is here that the revolution was accomplished—­had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer gave employment to the mass of field labourers.  The first blast of factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers, smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great mass of men, women, and children without defense, void of all rights, and given the alternative of submission to the dominance of the exploiters, or starvation.

Without capital the new industry could neither begin nor continue.  The exploits of the “joint-stock companies” invented and perfected in the eighteenth century, showed how this capital could easily be obtained, while the paralyzing and dismemberment of the Church during the Reformation had resulted in the abrogation of the old ecclesiastical inhibition against usury.  The necessary capital was forthcoming, and the foundations were laid for the great system of finance which was one of the triumphant achievements of the last century.