serfs had been under feudalism, the wage-workers were
bound to their tools. They were not bound to a single master, they were
not branded on the cheek, but they were, nevertheless, dependent upon
the industrial lords. Economic mastery gradually shifted from the
land-owning class to the class of manufacturers. The political and
social history of the Middle Ages is largely the record of the struggle
for supremacy which was waged between these two classes. That struggle
is the central fact of the Protestant Reformation and the Cromwellian
Commonwealth.

The second stage of capitalism begins with the birth of the machine age;
the introduction of the great mechanical inventions of the latter half
of the seventeenth century, and the resulting industrial revolution, the
salient features of which we have already traced. That revolution
centered in England, whose proud but, from all other points of view than
the commercial, foolish boast for a full century it was to be "the
workshop of the world." The new methods of production, and the
development of trade with India, and the colonies and the United States
of America, providing a vast and apparently almost unlimited market, a
tremendous rivalry was created among the people of England, tauntingly,
but with less originality than bitterness, designated "a nation of
shopkeepers" by Napoleon the First. Competition flourished and commerce
grew under its mighty urge. Quite naturally, therefore, competition came
to be regarded as "the life of trade," and the one supreme law of
progress by British economists and statesmen. The economic conditions of
the time fostered a sturdy individualism on the one hand, expressing
itself in a policy of _laissez faire_, which, paradoxically, they as
surely destroyed. The result was the paradox of a nation of theoretic
individualists becoming, through its poor laws, and more especially
through the vast body of industrial legislation which developed in
spite of theories of _laissez faire_, a nation of practical
collectivists.

The third and last stage of capitalism is characterized by new forms of
industrial ownership, administration, and control. Concentration of
industry and the elimination of competition are the distinguishing
features of this stage. When, more than half a century ago, the
Socialists predicted an era of industrial concentration and monopoly as
the outcome of the competitive struggles of the time, their prophecies
were mocked and der