The economic alteration that accompanied and followed
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century transformation of western
economy overturned various aspects of the western social structure:

1. Representative government made its appearance and spread
widely;

2. Social services and social security, previously reserved for
the elite, were provided for wider and wider circles of the
population;

3. Changes in technology, advances in science, the replacement
of landlords, clergymen and soldiers by businessmen
and professionals, including the military, as the recognized
leaders of the modern society, put social control in the hands
of a new ruling bourgeois class;

4. The bourgeois revolution brought into existence two other
classes: the industrial proletariat as an ally and/or an
acceptable leader of the peasant masses of Europe. At the
same time it enlarged the middle class to a point at which
it was able to play a decisive role in the formulation and
direction of social policy in industrialized communities.

5. Fragments of the industrial proletariat and the greatly
enlarged middle class came together in an avowedly revolutionary
movement: socialism-communism, which reached
the power summit between 1910 and 1917.

6. The bourgeoisie countered with a cold war aimed to exterminate
socialism-communism, using propaganda, petty
reform and armed intervention as its chief agencies.

7. The high birth rate, the prolongation of life and mass education
provided society with a substantial body of skilled,
experienced, socially conscious, alert citizens, increasingly
aware of the historical changes through which they were
living and determined to intervene whenever their well-being
was threatened.

8. Extension and equalization of opportunity opened the way
for an informed citizenry to express itself and defend its
interests.

9. Emerging planet-wide social consciousness spread an awareness
that the concerns, plans and programs of any part of
the human family are of vital importance to the whole of
mankind.

Change is a universal force which operates in nature, in society, in man
himself. At times it takes place so gradually that one day seems like
another. At other times it operates with furious energy, turning things
upside-down overnight. Such change, whether it takes place in nature or
in society is revol