of free citizens
that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch, the
small land-holders, citizens, craftsmen and artists of fifty different
sorts, has begun rapidly to dissolve, has almost vanished by the middle
of the seventeenth century, and in another hundred years has practically
disappeared.

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 b