rfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of
our population were possessed of the means of production, we should
be in a very different situation from that in which we find
ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business
was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date
England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a
vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it is
this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later
thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which
we find ourselves to-day.[18]

It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of
modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that
unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable
textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that
"the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product
of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:

The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership
into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary
connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving
methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical
sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that
England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was _already_
captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series of great
discoveries began.[19]

We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically
and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in
the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of
the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both
economically and politically free:

The three forms under which labour was exercised--the serf, secure
in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were
but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent
save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the
Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for
craft production, for transport and for commerce--all three between
them were making for a society which should be based upon the