As a class, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland.  Under mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the peasant was a happier one than he had known before.  He had achieved definite status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very thin and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land tenure, the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood and monasticism.  The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this, however; absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the abolition of the guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the dominance of the Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the position he had held under the Roman Empire, and from which Christianity had lifted him.  By 1790 he had been for nearly three centuries under a progressive oppression that had undone nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle Ages and made the peasant class practically outlaw, while breaking down its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood visible as law and order in the persons of the ruling class.

Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving aristocracy, came this irruption from below.  In their own persons certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force of modernism.  Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities, and by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the world.

Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in government.  The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which lay the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine, could give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was such a thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to the absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which was fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the ally of the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as the misery and the degradation of the proletariat.  In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.  It was a splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed in the personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.